


Like One of Your French Girls

by crystanagahori



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Art School, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Hate to Love, Rey is an artist, art school au, but anyway, here have a nude drawing AU, nobody asked for this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-13
Updated: 2019-10-14
Packaged: 2020-10-17 20:44:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 23,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20627279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crystanagahori/pseuds/crystanagahori
Summary: Rey really, really needs a nude model for her figure drawing class. Ben Solo, (who only seems to be asshole extraordinaire whenever Rey is around) bravely volunteers.What could possibly go wrong?aka the Art School AU nobody asked for.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic brought to you by pettiness!

**** “Please, Poe? You would be doing me a MASSIVE favor, and I would be so grateful,” Rey wheedled, walking down Berchmans Hall with Poe Dameron, begging and talking like they were in an Aaron Sorkin show. “I will actually cook for you. I will be that grateful.”

The man seemed to consider it for a second. When Rey was stressed, she cooked, and cooked really well. Something about college and coping mechanisms worked for her, and nothing calmed her mote than cooking up a storm. She usually had her friends knocking at her door and begging for a taste of whatever she had on cooking on the stove. And when she cooked for someone? A religious experience. 

Not that Rey had cooked for a lot of people before. Just Finn, once. And once was enough for him to sing her praises to anyone who would listen. 

“Nobody wants to help a poor FA undergrad than me, Rey, you know that,” Poe shrugged. “But I’m telling you. I can’t.”

Poe Dameon with his flashy good looks, and perfect hair, actually looked apologetic. Rey wanted to groan. It was completely unfair that he was standing in front of her being all luminous and the perfect subject, and she wasn’t allowed to draw him. She was supposed to be in a figure drawing class, after all. 

Ever since he became a TA in one of Rey’s Art Management classes, she’d been continually surprised a just how much charisma and charm one man can ooze. 

But then again, he had flirted with her best friend Finn on the first day of that class, so Rey shouldn’t have been surprised at being hit with the excess of it. 

Interesting and eye-catching, Poe always carried around an easy, charismatic veneer that Rey would have loved to try to peel back. Unfortunately, her friend was being annoyingly reticent about the whole thing. She knew he’d done the nude modelling thing before as well, he’d told her and Finn as much. 

“If this is a self-consciousness thing, I don’t believe you,” Rey crossed her arms over her chest, cocked her hip to the side, her usual pose. “I don’t believe you for one bloody second.”

“Oh please. I’ve dropped trou for many a figure drawing class,” Poe shrugged as they walked into the department office. 

The place was a lot like Chandrila University’s FA Department itself—a little slapdash and poorly lit, with no indication that it was in fact one of the university’s “centers of excellence” and the previous home of some of the greats in the art world. There was Yoda and his near perfect sculptures of the human figure, made at the age of eighty, Ben Kenobi’s loving portraits of the people in his life, made with so much love you couldn’t pass by them and not shed a tear. Then there were Padmé Amidala’s gorgeous cityscapes, housed in the school’s Art Gallery. She had the ability to paint skies that looked like they stretched into infinity. 

But the school’s pride and joy was in the experimental art of Anakin Skywalker. His work was worth millions, and the school had sold everything they had of his in their collection, save for one piece, the famous _Angel, _a portrait of Padmé six months before she died.

Then, of course, there was the long standing rumor that Kylo Ren was a university student. Kylo Ren, the renegade street artist, whose street graffiti was as loud as the political messages alongside it, and caused tongues to wag and conservative oldies to cry foul. It was hard to be a student in Chandrila University (the FA Department, especially) and not talk about Kylo Ren. Rey had to do a paper on a contemporary artist once, and chose him. She wasn’t a fan of renegade street art, but she had to admit, his stencilled-in style was distinct and extremely technical. His work was full of rage and anger, mostly directed at the Baby Boomers trying to run the world into the ground, but Rey picked up a sense of isolation and loneliness to his work, which got her an A on her paper, thank you very much. 

Anyway. The Fine Arts Department of Chandrila University was, at best, a mixed bag. But Rey loved every minute of it. She was thoroughly enjoying the last three years getting her degree. Sure, a degree in Painting wasn’t exactly the most profitable thing in the world, but it was what made her soul sing, and she had to believe that everything was going to work out. 

Case in point, the department’s dean, Luke Skywalker was in his always open office, meditating. Possibly dreaming up a new piece or just taking a nap on his desk. Always hard to tell with him. But Rey took it as a good omen that good things were about to come into her horizon…like Poe agreeing to model for her. 

“Poe, I love you, but I fail to see the downside to this,” Rey said, crossing her arms over her chest as Poe did…whatever it was TAs were supposed to be doing in between finishing their masters in Visual Art Administration. “Do you think I wouldn’t do you justice?”  


“I know you would,” he said without hint of sarcasm. Wow, he actually believed that. “But it’s not that.”

“Enlighten me?” she followed him past the lobby to the offices. 

“Why do you need a solo model anyway? I thought you were taking Holdo’s class. She does her figure drawing sessions in a group, with her own models,” Poe pointed out like Rey didn’t already know that. 

“She does, but she told me to find my own,” Rey grumbled. “I get too self- conscious in the group class. I literally break out in hives, so now, I’m several plates behind and in danger of failing.”  


“So drop the class.”  


“I can’t, it’s a pre-requisite, and stop trying to explain my problem away,” she raised a brow wryly at Poe, and he backed off. Rey appreciated it that he knew when to back off. “I really want to master this. And I need it. Holdo suggested I set up a few private sessions, find someone I’m comfortable with, and ease into it. And I’m comfortable with you, and I can ease into it.”

“Because I’m gay?”  


“Because you’re my friend, you numpty,” Rey rolled her eyes. “Help me Poe Dameron, you’re my only hope.”

The man sighed, ran a hand through his hair and smiled at Rey the way he would smile at his dog BB-8. She could already imagine how easy it was going to be to break the man down into shapes and slowly, slowly rebuild his image on paper. Rey actually loved her figure drawing class, it fascinated her endlessly how one can break even the most complicated of things down and then put them back together in a way that made perfect sense. The school was a firm believer in mastering the basics before diving in to more experimental, creative work, and Rey loved it. 

But then Poe frowned, and the illusion was shattered. 

“Sorry Rey. I’ve modelled for Holdo so many times, I’ve been banned,” He shrugged like this kind of thing happened all the time. 

“That’s not…are you serious?”

“Yes!” Poe said. “There was one year that five people asked me to model for them for their final, and she asked them all to repeat it, just because she hated my face.” 

A look crossed his face that made Rey think that there was something more to the story, but clearly the man wasn’t planning on helping her, nor was he going to tell her more. 

“So I’ve been instructed to tell anyone who asks that my face, my body and my figure have a lifetime ban from Professor Holdo’s class,” he shrugged like this kind of thing happened to him all the time. 

Rey sighed, defeated. What was she going to do now? Finn was way too busy doing his Information Design stuff (the only course in the program that resulted in real world jobs, as everyone liked to joke), and Rose was currently away on an exchange program. There was nobody else she was comfortable with, not a single person on earth that—

“Oh, hey Ben,” Poe said casually to the figure that practically stomped into the room. 

Rey whirled around and tried not to gasp. She was always surprised whenever she came in contact with Ben Solo. It was almost as if her brain refused to process the man’s towering height, the broadness of his shoulders, the way his bottom lip seemed bitten and kissed. He also had that funny nose, and those ears hidden behind dark hair. He had this way of commanding a room when he needed to, and slinking into it when he wanted.

“Poe,” he said with a little nod, before he turned to Rey. “Scavenger.”

That was a little unfair. So he’d spotted her once rooting through the school garbage because she’d accidentally lobbed one of her plates into the trash bin in a moment of weakness. It was _one time. _

But then again, it was only one time that she and Ben had seen each other across the room at a party. One time that they danced, their bodies moving together so perfectly that Rey thought that her entire body was humming (she still couldn’t listen to _Call Your Girlfriend _and not cringe, because he’d ruined it). She’d been so sure that he’d wanted her too, so she kissed him. Pulled him close, gently coaxed his head down so her lips could touch his. The kiss had been warm and electric (and she still imagined being kissed like that again) but when Ben pulled away, it was clear that it was the last thing he’d wanted. 

Then it turned out he and Poe were friends, that he was a fellow TA taking a Master’s degree in the same school, in the same department, and she’d pretended not to know who he was. He played along, and neither of them mentioned it since. They’d since devolved into this weirdly antagonistic relationship—in short, they hated each other’s guts, and everyone knew that. 

“Ben,” Rey said, crossing her arms over her chest. She did not have time to talk to the guy who once told her that Manet’s work was “okay” and that his contributions to the art world were not as significant as the rest of the Impressionists, who actually had the balls to be a part of the first Impressionist exhibit, then called the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, Engravers, etc. He was also the guy that said Berthe Morisot was “more muse than artist,” and that Van Gogh wouldn’t be half the artist he was without Paul Gaugin.

Art History students. Can’t live with them, can’t have an FA department without them. 

“Rey was just telling me about her dilemma with Holdo’s class,” Poe said casually, and Rey shot him a look. It was one of the school’s big mysteries, how on earth Poe managed to be friends with Ben Solo, the same Ben Solo who chewed out seniors every year and dissected their thesis work until it was nothing but scrap paper, the same Ben Solo who wouldn’t hesitate to fail a student, even if he was just the TA. “She asked me to model.”  


“That’s incredibly stupid,” Ben scoffed. “Hasn’t she heard of the ban?” 

“She hadn’t, and she would appreciate if you spoke to her directly,” Rey snapped before she turned to Poe like Ben wasn’t in the room at all. “Poe, I appreciate you trying to help, but I really have to find a model by the end of the day, so…”  


“I’ll do it,” Ben said, and Rey could have sworn that she’d heard that wrong. She would have liked to have heard it wrong, but at the same time, she knew she hadn’t. Fate wasn’t that kind. 

She slowly turned in her heel and turned to face the man. He had a tiny smirk on his face, that little flash of evil that she was used to seeing. Ordinarily, Rey would have ignored that, but there was just…something about it that her brain had latched on to. Was it the way the light from the window caught on his face? The way it seemed to make his eyes light up like fire was smoldering beneath them? Rey could draw that. She could put all of Ben Solo on paper and find out exactly what lay beneath that…solid muscle exterior. 

She knew this feeling, knew what it was like to have inspiration strike you in a blaze. And all Ben had to do was look at her. How could she put that little smirk on paper? In Rey’s hands, what would Ben Solo look like?

She was _not_ inspired. She couldn’t be, not when this guy had ruined her favorite song, had antagonized her for the last year.

“Well?” He asked. 

Damn it. Dean Skywalker, who insisted that everyone just call him “Luke,” was a firm believer that any good artist knew the meaning of balance. Creating art was work as much as it was play, and he stressed the importance of being able to “turn off” to his students. Rey liked to say that cooking was her escape, but there was no cooking involved here.

“Well what?” She asked, because she needed the upper hand in this situation. And Ben, clearly not one to back down, pushed his glasses higher up his nose, crossed his massive arms over his chest and just…towered over her. “You’re really volunteering.”

“To be your model? Yes,” he said, and it took Rey all of her willpower to ignore Poe’s extremely dramatic gasp behind her. “I’ve done it before. I don’t mind.”

Every instinct in Rey’s body told her to latch on to that little tidbit and pounce_. I’ve done it before. _That meant that somebody in this establishment had seen Ben Solo naked, and actually lived to tell the tale.

And they said pigs couldn’t fly. 

“But I do. Mind, that is,” Rey countered, and no she definitely was not trying to make herself look taller. “Who says I even _want you _as a model?”  


“You want me,” was all he said. Infuriatingly. In that deep, husky voice that was supposed to be reserved for reverence and sex and affection. It unnerved Rey that he could unnerve her this easily, with that face, that smirk, that…that everything. 

She shouldn’t agree to this. It just sounded like a bad idea, on all fronts. But then again. 

“Fine,” she said. 

“Fine,” he shrugged. 

“I’ve got your number.”

“I’ll wait for your call.” 

Ben turned to whoever it was standing behind Rey, and said something about a schedule thing before he turned, and left. It was impossible for the man to walk. He stomped and plodded everywhere he went. 

Rey watched him go, her jaw a little slack. How could someone so incredibly dorky be this much of an asshole? It was almost like Ben was two completely different people at the same time. When he was around others, he was this almost shy, quiet, reserved thing—every time he and Finn were left in a room together, the silence was so thick you could almost feel it as you walked in—but around Rey he was…such. An. Asshole. 

“Well,” Poe said, making Rey jump about fifty feet, because, yes. She had completely forgotten he was there. What had she been talking to him about again? “That was interesting. Are you going to call him?”

Rey turned her head just in time to see Professor Amylin Holdo walk in to the faculty room, and sighed. She was going to have to do this, whether she liked it or not.

And, she was never, ever _ever _going to admit this to anyone, but she liked it. 

Damn it.

* * *

“No,” Finn’s voice dropped as low as his jaw as he stood behind the kitchen counter, where Rey was currently glaring at her pot of simmering corn chowder. She’d stormed in and out of the local farmer’s market the moment her classes ended and started chopping and cooking seconds after she laid everything on the counter. “He didn’t. Ben Solo did not volunteer to be your model.”

She’d started with the broth, using the corn cobs with some of her favorite aromatics (and that list changed almost every time she had to use it) to make it in a pot, while she worked on the rest of the chowder. Finn had walked in to their shared apartment at some point, taking one whiff of the air and parking himself in his usual spot by the counter. Rey never asked for any payment when she cooked, but she did need to vent, and Finn was the best at listening to her vent. 

She was just waiting for the soup to finish when she’d finished her story. 

“Oh he did. There were witnesses. Your boyfriend was a witness,” Rey scoffed, tasting the chowder, without blowing on the spoon, and it had been a bit too hot. “Holy fucking balls that’s hot.”

“Okay, you need to calm down.”  


“I am calm!” Rey insisted, turning her attention back to the chowder. She was going to have to turn the burner off in a bit, just to let it start cooling, but she wasn’t quite ready to let go yet. 

“You know you could just…not call him,” Finn suggested. Sweet, innocent and loveable Finn, who, while a great listener, was also really bad at giving advice. Or, at least, that was what Rose said before she and Rey completely ignored him and did what they wanted. Papa Finn was always there to cluck his tongue and tell them ‘I told you so.’

“I can’t,” Rey groaned, turning off the burner. The residual heat was going to cook the chowder for a bit, then it would be ready to serve. She’d made too much, she always made too much, but she didn’t cook every night, and that was what their personal slave Chef Mic(rowave) was for. “I don’t want him to think he has something over me.”  


“Because kissing him on a dance floor last year is still something we’re not talking about?” Finn asked wryly, because of course he knew about that. 

“This is not about that. Ben and I are way past that,” she said, and she hated the way the words ‘Ben and I’ rolled off her tongue. “This is about my pride, my dignity, and passing that bloody figure drawing class if it’s the last thing I do.” 

“So…why haven’t you called him yet?” 

“Because,” Rey said, scooping chowder into two bowls, and Finn grabbing the box wine from the refrigerator. “I hate defeat.”  


“It tastes suspiciously like corn chowder,” Finn grinned from behind his bowl, and Rey actually laughed. Trust her best friend to make her feel just a little bit better about this whole thing. 

* * *

After dinner, Finn dove straight into his Typography homework, and Rey did some reading for her required English class. They were currently reading Sense and Sensibility, and she had to admit she was legitimately too lost in the writing—she liked the words like ‘wither’ and ‘mischance,’ liked how the words built into a pretty solid picture of the world in it. 

_Or maybe you’re just stalling,_ she told herself, glaring at her charging phone. It was eleven in the evening on a Friday, no doubt Ben was probably slinking back into his coffin, or doing something a lot more inconvenient. It would be a small payment for the humiliation of actually asking him for what she really, truly, had to admit to herself that she wanted. 

Like it or not, Ben Solo was going to be a great subject for drawing.

“I hope you’re in the bathroom. Or doing something that will make it extremely inconvenient for you to answer the phone,” Rey told her ringing phone in no uncertain terms. 

And if she had the sudden image of Ben grabbing the phone with his hair dipping wet from a shower and his towel wrapped around his waist, then…nobody had to know. 

“Hello?” His voice, always deep, seemed extra rough when he finally answered. He seemed a little breathless too, which could only mean Rey’s little wish had come true. 

“Studio D, tomorrow, seven sharp,” Rey practically barked. “Don’t be late.”

He said nothing in response, nothing except a low chuckle. 

“Look, you can always back out, I’m sure I can—“

“I’ll be there,” he said, with all the swaggering confidence of a man who didn’t make a killing doing freelance wedding calligraphy. “Seven sharp.” 

“Don’t be late.”  


“You already said that.”  


“I’m just making sure you got the message.”

“I’ll bring coffee,” he said, in still that challenging tone. “Milk, twenty sugars?”  


“Ha-ha,” her cheeks flamed red. Of course he knew she liked her coffee milky and sweet. Just like she knew that he drank his coffee black. “I’ll bring breakfast.”

“Looking forward to it, scavenger.”  


“Whatever, Solo.”

He hung up. Rey glared at her phone and practically smashed her finger into the ‘end call’ button. 

“You know, if I didn’t know any better,” Poe said, standing in her doorway with a bowl of chowder. “It would have sounded like you and Ben were cooing sweet nothings to each other, and going, ‘no you hang up first,’ ‘no you.’”

Rey flicked him the V, which only made Poe laugh even harder before he walked down the hallway in his pajamas and her chowder.

She was in trouble. _Big. Trouble. _


	2. Chapter 2

Contrary to popular belief, Ben Solo was not an asshole. 

Or at least he really, really tried not to be. He was raised by...pretty decent people, after all. He would even call them kind, but only when he was feeling generous. 

Yes, he had issues, but he liked to think that he was marginally better now. After having gone through hell and back, he was still at that stage where he was shocked that he’d emerged from Snoke’s grasp at all. 

But that didn’t mean that Ben didn’t have his moments. He could still be a colossal asshole on his worst days. Like that day he was supposed to meet Poe’s boyfriend’s friends, and his Uber driver had insisted on taking the wrong route to the club, taking twice the time at a surge rate. Ben had chewed him out and walked the rest of the way, too keyed up to remember to be kind. 

He could also be an idiot in his worst days too. Like that same night whenhe was too tense to be useful at conversation, so he took a shot and danced with a random stranger, uncharacteristically unself-conscious about it all. Naturally, he fell head over heels in love with the girl whose body seemed to fit his exactly, who seemed to know how to grind up against him. He fell in love with the girl with jut glimpses of her soft brown hair, the taut skin on her body, the little smile on her lips. Then of course, she’d kissed him. But Ben Solo the idiot had been so shocked, so struck dumb by it that he’d said nothing. Not even to correct her when she thought he hadn’t felt the same way.

Then she pretended not to know who he was when they were introduced, and the asshole naturally came crawling out. Now his and Rey’s relationship had devolved into...whatever this was, and he didn’t know how to stop. Because if he stopped, then she would walk away from him. And he didn’t want her to walk away. 

So. Asshole it was. 

“Heading out early, kid?” 

The rough voice caught him off guard, made his heart stop in his chest. Ben turned, and only saw the empty living room of his apartment. Logically, he knew it was just an echo. Han used to ask him that all the time, whenever he so much as put on a pair of shoes inside the house. 

But this was a completely different place, a different time, and his father wasn’t here.

Almost as if the universe was trying to conspire against him, his phone rang. His mother was calling at six thirty in the morning, which could mean a multitude of things—she was bored, she was awake and needed him to commiserate and be miserable about it, or she was on her way somewhere else for work, which was a new thing, since in the thirty two years that Ben had been alive, he had never been informed of his mother’s travel plans until after Han. Or maybe she was sick, in the hospital, and she needed him. There’d been an accident, and he needed to abandon his plans and rush over to her side. 

The thought of that had him picking up his phone. For all his mother’s faults and his father’s failings, Ben loved his parents. He’d forgotten that, years ago, but he wasn’t about to go around forgetting again.

“Mom,” he said, hoping his conveyed business, and mild concern. He was sure it wasn’t, but whatever. 

“Is my nose really that big?” She asked, and for the second time that day, Ben froze. Jesus Christ. This being a somewhat average son thing was going to kill him. “I like that you made my hair into tentacles. It suits me.”

“You’re at the exhibit,” he said, shaking his head. He’d briefly wondered which of his sordid past Snoke had chosen to put on display this time. Good to know. “I told you not to go. That’s not me anymore.”  


“I know. I’m a patron of the arts, Ben, it’s part of the title to go around and see what the public has declared to be good,” she said casually like she wasn’t staring at Kylo Ren’s vision of his mother—a tentacled monster hell bent on saving the world while ignoring the bloody little squid boy behind her who lost his balloon. “And this is…good.”

“You used that same tone when I gave you fingerprint drawings in kindergarten,” he said dryly, tying his shoes. It seemed ridiculous to put on clothes when he was going to go somewhere to just take them off. In front of Rey. “You really shouldn’t be there.”

“I know,” she said, and guilt crept into her voice. It broke Ben’s heart. How many times was he going to do that to her? “I just…I couldn’t sleep. And I wanted to see this. And think about how much better we are now. We’re better, aren’t we?”  


“Yes,” he said, and this time, he was sure. “We’re better.” 

It was a slow, agonizing thing to recognize what had happened to you before and move on from it. To look at your parents’ sins against you and accept that it wasn’t your fault. They were almost kids when they got together, and there had been so little time for them to figure out how to get their shit together before Ben came screaming into the world. But they had tried. For all of their shortcomings, Ben knew that they had tried. 

Nowadays, he couldn’t look at any of Kylo Ren’s work without cringing, or wanting to pull it from the wall. He’d been angry. He still was sometimes, but now at least he didn’t have the voice of his manager breathing down his neck and fuelling it.

_Creation is torture_, Anakin Skywalker once said. Ben had held on to that and clamped on when he was Kylo Ren.

He was beginning to think his new foray into visual art wasn’t as breezy as he predicted it was going to be. There was a reason why he decided to take his masters in Art History instead. 

“Good,” Leia said, and he could almost hear her, turning around and walking away from _Dismemberment and Discord_, the latest Kylo Ren exhibit Snoke had mounted, open 24/7 to any curious eyes and future bidders. 

Years ago, Ben didn’t give a shit to what Snoke was doing about the graffiti he slapped on to walls, as long as he got to do it, had lawyers on retainer and got his message out on blast. But now that he was gone Snoke was bleeding it for all it was worth, holding rights to all of Kylo’s work, and there was nothing Ben could do about it but hope that his former name, his former life would just die out.

Fat chance of that happening. It seemed the less he created, the less he spoke, the more people wanted a piece of Kylo Ren. Well, they were going to be sorely disappointed.

“Am I seeing you next weekend?” Leia asked, bringing him back to the conversation. She was still serving a term in the Senate, a position which afforded her very little free time on weekdays. Weekends too, supposedly, but she’d blocked them all off when Han…when Han happened. 

It was a two hour train ride from New York to Washington. Ben always made the trip.

“I’m useless company,” he said, like he always did. “And we can’t talk about anything that matters.”

Because it always ended in one of them blowing up and hurting the other.   


“That’s okay,” she always said. It was always okay. Sweep it under a rug, it’s fine. “We’ll get there.”  


“Yeah,” he said, hanging up before Leia could say anything more. Talking to his mother always left his heart feeling heavy. Made him want to stay at home and rage, and scream and mourn. 

His phone chimed with a text. 

_If you aren’t already on the subway, you’re going to be late. _

Rey. He’d almost forgotten why he was getting ready to leave. 

_The barista at the coffee place is still hunting down sugar. Your order finished off their supply, _he replied, rushing out the door and hot footing it to his regular coffee place.

_Ha-ha, _was her only response. In spite of himself, Ben grinned. He liked being able to one up her. _I hope you like burnt toast for breakfast. _

_Oh honey. You didn’t have to cook, _Ben actually heard himself chuckle as he looked up at the barista and ordered. The barista had a little look on her face, the same look people got when they saw someone in love—like they were being let in on a secret, and…had Ben been in love, it would have been fine, maybe. 

But he wasn’t. 

He definitely wasn’t.

* * *

He was early. Ha. Sure he took an Uber instead of the subway, but what she didn’t know…he was never going to tell her. 

He walked in to Studio D and looked around the room. The FA Department had one of the higher buildings at the edge of campus, and Rey had chosen a studio that faced out to the wilderness and empty lots, perfect for privacy. The studio was warm and airy, with soft morning light filling the space. There wasn’t much in the room—a few cabinets and drawers, papers, sharpeners, abandoned pencils. There was a curtain set up on the side where the models could change (or un-change, as in his case), and a platform for them to stand. Then a smattering of easels and chairs. 

He sighed, and placed Rey’s ridiculous coffee order on one of the chairs. The thing was iced, had three different kinds of syrups that had no business being in coffee, and four shots of espresso. It usually took her a minute to explain her order to the average barista.

Ben remembered it, just because he wanted to annoy her. 

“I’m not late,” Rey announced, sweeping in to the studio with a backpack, a sullen look, and a little takeout bag. 

“I didn’t say anything.” 

“I could hear you thinking,” she grumbled. Rey plopped the takeout bag on the chair next to her coffee. “Breakfast is served, honey.”

Ben crossed the room and took a peek inside the brown paper bag.

“McMuffins,” Ben said dryly, taking one and biting into it. Mmm. Sodium. 

Not looking at him, Rey picked up her coffee, tossed the straw in the nearby bin and replaced it with a metal one from her backpack. Ben snorted. 

“What?” she asked. Clearly one of them wasn’t a morning person. 

“The point of the metal straw is so you don’t toss another plastic one into the ocean,” he said, quirking his brow as she sipped greedily on her coffee like a starved junkie. “You tossed the plastic straw to put the metal one in. It defeats the purpose. If you really were an Earth warrior, you would just not ask for the straw and drink from the cup. Or carry your own cup.”  


“Force of habit,” was all Rey said, consuming her McMuffin in about three seconds. 

“Amazing.” 

“Sit,” Rey said, pointing to the dais with more force than he thought she was capable of. Ben put his coffee cup down, attempting to take off his jacket, when Rey barked. “Don’t strip.”

“Really?” He asked. “I thought the point of this was to strip.”  


Normally this was an invitation for her to jump in with sarcasm or an annoyed quip, but instead, Rey just glared at him. Huh. Ben took off his jacket and shrugged. 

“Just getting comfortable,” he said, taking his coffee and sitting on the dais, with her pacing and watching him like he was a caged animal about to strike. Even if it felt more accurate to reverse that description. She looked incredibly tense, from the way the corners of her lips seemed pressed together, the way she walked back and forth in front of him. Ben fought the urge to reach out and smooth her furrowed brow. He rolled it into a ball and shoved it down deep. 

“Are you okay?” He finally asked. It wasn’t part of their usual antagonistic repartee, and the surprised look on her face told him that. Any emotion she had banked for the moment released in a slow exhale. 

Ben suddenly realized that this was the first time he and Rey were alone. There was usually a buffer between them—Poe to watch, entertained by them, Finn usually trying to keep the peace or even Rose, to side with Rey just because she didn’t like Ben’s face. 

But just him and Rey? Never. 

“I’m fine,” Rey finally said, getting a sketchpad, pencils and an eraser from her bag, setting her up her workspace. For someone who walked around campus with her hair in a haphazard bun most of the time, she was oddly particular about this. “Nervous, maybe.”

“Do I make you nervous?” He asked, his brow quirking up. 

Rey stiffened in a way that definitely told him, _yes, _but she said nothing, so he chose to file away that little bit of information for later on. 

“This plate makes me nervous,” she said, finally taking a seat. “I’ve been given another chance, I don’t want to fuck it up.” 

“Holdo is a good teacher. She wants to see your style, what you’ve learned from her classes,” Ben noted. Not that he’d taken Holdo’s class before. He’d just heard enough about her teaching philosophy when his mother came to campus and dragged him to dinner with her. 

“That’s just it,” Rey said, still frowning. Now he knew something was wrong, because ordinarily she would have snapped at him for that. “I don’t know what my style is. I have no style. My style is picking up a pencil and drawing what I see. This is the first time I’m actually getting formal instruction on something this technical, and I don’t want to fail.” 

“Well, I’m here,” Ben shrugged. “You have to start somewhere.”

“I know,” she said, and there was just a little bit of her usual fire there that made him think that this new dynamic was going to be fine for the both of them. “Just…stay there while I strategize.”

“Not naked?”

“A little excited to get naked, are we, Solo?” Rey grinned. 

“Just helping you out,” he shrugged. “Like I said, I’ve done this before. I could teach you a few things.”

“Yeah, I’m finding it a little hard to believe you,” Rey shook her head, and already he could see her pencil moving on the paper. He wondered what she could see, what he was doing that caught her eye. Was it his hair? His nose? People tended to focus on his nose. “Who was it for?”  


“What?”  


“The nude modeling. Who was the lucky artist that got to capture your essence?” She joked, not really looking at him. Ben wondered for a second what she was doing. He was literally fidgeting and moving and being the worst subject ever. 

“Oh, I did it for Luke Skywalker’s sculpting class one summer.”

“You nude modelled for your uncle’s class? The dean of this school’s sculpting class?” Rey nearly spluttered. “Seriously?”  


“Seriously. I needed money the summer I turned twenty, and I had a choice between standing somewhere for a couple of hours a day in the buff or working at my Da—Han’s garage. Guess what I chose,” he shrugged. It hadn’t been a big deal. Ben was raised by a somewhat hippie mother and an uncle who believed in free love, he was taught not to be self conscious of his body. 

But that was the summer he also took the money he got and ran from home, looking for a place to blow all of the built up anger and resentment he had towards Luke, Han, Leia, all of them, all of it. 

Not his finest hour. Not by a long shot. But there are a few sketches and sculptures out there in the world of twenty year old Kylo Ren naked and pre-fame. Some part of him thought it was ironic and incredibly hilarious. 

Obviously his therapist did not agree. 

“Right,” Rey said, still focused on…whatever it was she was doing. “Can you put down the coffee? And take off your shirt.”

“That quick, huh,” he commented, obliging. He had just reached for the hem of his shirt when he heard Rey snort. 

“Too fast for you?”  


“I’m good,” he shrugged, taking off his shirt. And, because he was Ben Solo and he had manners, he neatly folded his discarded shirt and put it next to his coffee. He placed his hands on his hips and looked at Rey, who, much to his satisfaction, looked a little shell-shocked. 

He hadn’t considered that when he’d so brazenly volunteered to strip himself in front of her. He’d just been so confident of his own walls that he didn’t bother to think about it. 

And now they were here, with her on the other side of the easel, looking at him. Drinking in the lines and contours of his body. He wasn’t ashamed to say that he worked on it, but that didn’t mean that there were things he’d hoped she’d never see—the horrible scar that marred his side from the accident with Han, a tattoo on his upper arm, a black sketch of a cloud in Van Gogh’s Starry Night. Ben took a deep inhale and held his breath, as if waiting for her to judge him.

God, what would happen when he actually took off his pants? 

“Rey?” He asked, and he didn’t mean for his voice to sound small. But it was. He didn’t expect this vulnerability, and it was just his shirt.

She seemed to snap back to reality, blinking and shaking her head. He realized she’d been biting on her lower lip. It was a little swollen. She seemed a little flushed, too. Like she’d…enjoyed the view. 

Was this what she was like at _every _nude session? If so, she was in big trouble. And so was he. 

“Yup, fine,” she said, clearing her throat, and looking down at her sketchbook again. “Keep your hands on your hips, tilt your chin up a little. Like you’re about to take me out.”

“On a date?” 

“With a laser beam glare,” she corrected him, but she gave him a wry smile in return.

“You think I have a laser beam glare?” He asked. He didn’t recall talking this much during a sketching session, but Rey hadn’t complained so far. 

“Yes,” she says, almost immediately, and he didn’t know if he should be proud or ashamed of that little fact. “You use it on other people all the time.”

“But not to you?” 

“Not to the people you’re…friends with,” she used the word carefully, he could see her hesitate to use it, and fair play to her. Two years ago, Ben never thought he would have friends, much less friends that actually seemed to (on some level), like him. Friends that actually invited him to things, argued with him and weren’t afraid to call him out on his bullshit…anymore. “I get a sense you don’t actually think we’re idiots.”

“Fuck. Cover’s blown,” he pretended to curse, and Rey actually giggled. He liked the sound of that. Liked that he was the one who got that sound from her. The night they met, he could barely see her face, just what the flashes of the dance floor’s lights afforded him—a glimpse of smooth skin, the shine of a glossed up lip—but he much preferred Rey like this. Bathed in sunlight, focused but sure of herself, completely at ease. 

Like she wasn’t going to bolt. 

“Don’t laugh, it ruins your image,” she told him, glancing at his body, then back to the paper where she was very quickly sketching. 

“So we’re friends now?” He asked her.

“Why, what did you think we were?” She asked, her brow furrowed, and he wondered if it was because of what he said, of because of her work. Ben really shouldn’t push this. They had just gotten past their antagonism. But he was who he was. So he pushed.

“Sworn enemies? Nemeses?” He suggested. “I didn’t think friends spent so much of their time shitting on each other.”

“Yeah, but it’s the good kind of shitting, the kind you can just laugh off because you know it’s both true and not true,” Rey smiled. “What kind of friends did you want us to be, Ben? Do you want us to talk about deep stuff?”  


“Deep stuff?”  


“Yeah, like…our childhood,” she winced, and coincidentally, so did he. Clearly that was out of the picture. “Our favorite colors?”

“I like black.”  


“I figured. I like Payne’s Grey.” 

“Unexpected,” he nodded, almost in recognition. 

“Why Starry Night?” 

Ben fought the urge to cover the tattoo with his hand. The very few people who had seen the tattoo thought it was just a bunch of random squiggles. And he knew he could lie, could give Rey some bullshit story about a girl who needed a warm body to practice on, and he’d agreed, but it didn’t feel right. He might as well tell her. 

Since they were friends, and all. 

“He was really depressed,” Ben said, almost feeling the prickle of the tattoo on his arm as Rey studied it. “Van Gogh.”

“But that’s not why you chose that,” Rey noted. 

“No. Even when he felt like there was nothing in the world left for him to live for, he painted when he could,” Ben said, and he couldn’t help it. His voice softened, and he felt…worried. Scared that Rey might judge him. “Even when he was at the pit of darkness. He always tried to find the light. Even if it got him in the end.”

His fists clenched, without him meaning to. The tattoo was a reminder of how there was beauty in that struggle, and that there was no shame in it. Van Gogh may have succumbed to the darkness eventually, but Ben didn’t have to. 

He wasn’t going to.

Something in his expression must have struck Rey, because she seemed to be redoubling her efforts in her work, telling him not to move, sketching quickly on a completely different side of the page. His expression softened, and she growled when she looked at him, again. 

“What?” He asked. 

“Ben, you…” she grumbled. “I need to rethink how I’m going to do this. Your body is all hard and scary, but that face. You can’t hide anything with that face, can you?”  


She said it like she was teasing him, but it hit Ben in squarely in the chest. That’s why he’d liked the anonymity of Kylo Ren. Nobody had to see what he was thinking, only see his work and the angry messages he was trying to lob at the world. 

But Ben Solo felt everything. And Rey was committing that to paper. 

She relaxed slightly, smiling. 

“That McMuffin barely sustained me. And I need more coffee. Can we get some breakfast?” 

“Oh,” he said. “Uh. Okay.”  


“Unless you just want to leave.”  


“No, breakfast is…is fine. Breakfast is good,” he nodded, picking up his abandoned coffee cup and putting his shirt back on. 

“Good,” she said, and he knew, in her head, she was already out the door, eating pancakes, probably. “I need to flesh out my idea more, think about my strategy before we start again tomorrow. Can we talk? Without the sarcasm and the baiting. I need…”

“You need a teacher.”

“A friend,” Rey corrected with a smile. “I need a friend.”  


“Of course,” he said, tossing his now empty coffee cup in the nearby bin. “You’re paying.”


	3. Chapter 3

Rey was looking at Ben, quite literally, in a whole new light. The morning sunshine gave way to a cooler grey day, and it just cast Ben’s face in the most fantastic muted hues. She hadn’t realized that his dark, dark eyes had little flecks of gold, until he looked out the window. In this softly diffused light she could imagine him as a statue, broad and massive, a little pensive. She’d never noticed just how much of a contradiction Ben Solo was. His height, his body all felt like armor almost, against his wonderfully expressive face.

He nervously nibbled at his bottom lip, as he rest his chin resting on the palm of his hand. Rey suddenly wondered what it would be like if he kissed her. That kiss in the club was momentary and quick, barely enough time to taste him, barely enough time to savor the moment. Those lips of his were downright sinful, she had a weird feeling that being kissed by Ben Solo was a religious experience she was missing out on. What would his hands feel like on her body? God, what would he feel like inside her? She had a weird feeling that Ben was secretly kinky—Poe had made a couple of jokes before to allude to handcuffs, or blindfolds or something.

She’d thought about it before, of course. She was only human. And she’d kissed him first, all those months ago. But that felt innocent compared to now, when he was sitting right across from her, and she was supposed to draw him, and...

“Spinach omelette?”

“Huh?”

“Your order,” Ben said, a little confused as the waitress held Rey’s plate of food.

“Right, my order. Spinach omelette. Right. Thanks,” Rey said, feeling her cheeks flush red as she took her plate.

She’d never seen him like this before, sitting across from her at a table, eating breakfast carefully and meticulously, like he was expecting a certain kind of order his food wasn't complying with. If she didn’t know him any better, it would seem like he was being a pretentious jerk about having to eat at the local greasy spoon, but, she did know him better, and she knew he was just a slow eater. A careful eater. The kind of guy who cupped his hand under his taco because he knew half of it was going to fall into his hand.

That’s the problem, isn’t it, she told herself. You feel like you know him, clearly, based on today, you don't. You really, really don't.

She couldn’t pin him down.

“Have you ever pictured me naked?” She asked him.

To Ben’s credit, he didn’t splutter or spit out his coffee. Sure his face went a little red, but any light in his eyes smoldered and burned, and Rey felt herself squirming in her seat as he looked at her.

“It’s been a while since I was in a figure drawing class,” he said, his voice low. “But I don’t remember models having to picture the artist naked for it.”

His eyes moved to her face, making a very obvious show of trailing down. Rey's breath caught in her throat and she choked on air.

“You have,” she realized.

And Ben didn’t even look the least bit apologetic about it. In fact, the bastard actually grinned.

“Ben!” She hissed, and she hated that her voice sounded a bit hysterical, because the look he was giving her was bordering on the fucking criminal. That look was in her head now, easy for her to conjure up when she was alone in her room, her hand between her legs. Fantasy Ben was particularly good at eating her out, and he enjoyed it, too.

But that didn’t mean Real Life Ben had any business looking at her like it was totally in the realm of possibility.

“Rey,” He said evenly. “What were you hoping to get out of this? To draw me, or fuck me?”

Holy shitting fucking arse. Rey had known the exact moment her relationship with Ben had turned antagonistic, but they'd never crossed this line before. Or, well, they had, but Rey wasn't used to Ben being the confident one. It was almost like he was a completely different person, and she would be lying if she said she wasn't into it.

Then the man laughed, and the heat between them completely evaporated. In a rush of embarrassment, Rey tossed her napkin at his face.

“Asshole,” She told him.

“Sorry,” he said, shaking his head. “But to be honest, I have. Pictured you naked. Of course I was never going to tell you, but since you’ve asked…”

“Oh. So…we’ve both pictured each other naked.”

“Seems like it,” he said, taking a sip of his coffee while looking at her. It had the odd effect of making her picture her fantasy again.

She didn’t know what was hotter—the way he’d looked at her, or that he’d openly admitted to imagining her naked. Now she was imagining him naked. Which was absolutely useless because she was supposed to be drawing from a still life model.

Why had she agreed to this again?

“Although to be honest, I don’t think the Rey in my head squares up to the real thing.”

It would have been so easy to respond to that with a challenge. It was their usual anyway, to try to one up each other. But this felt different. This felt a little too much.

“I doubt that,” she laughs. “I am not that kinky.”

“Hmm. The sex drawer in your apartment tells me otherwise.”

“What! Who told you—“

“Finn opened it accidentally once, when we were watching a movie,” Ben shrugged like it was no big deal. “The silk scarves were a nice touch.”

"Accidentally, my arse," she muttered. Rey felt like she couldn’t decide if she wanted to crawl out of her skin, die from embarrassment, or lunge across the table to kiss Ben. This wasn’t fair. He’d made it clear that night at the club that he wasn’t interested in her, why was he playing with her emotions like this?

She needed to put a stop to all of this. That night at the club, Rey had been so attached to Ben in those moments that having him cut her off sent her reeling. Maybe that was why it was easier to skirt along the edges of giving in to her emotions, because she didn’t want him to hurt her again.

“Anyway. About my plate,” she said, and Ben actually flinched, like she’d rejected him. Rey chose to ignore that and focus on the matter at hand. “I need some time to get to know you--your figure. For the assignment. It feels weird to keep reserving the studio if I can't get a few sketches in beforehand.”

"Makes sense," Ben nods. "How do you want to do this?"

"I think I need to observe you a little more," she said, telling herself over and over that it was fine, that she was an artist, and this was her process and she was sticking to it. She would have done the same if this was Poe, or Finn, or Rose, or any model she was drawing an intimate sketch of. Rey just couldn't detach from that. "See you in your natural habitat." 

"My natural habitat, huh," he pressed his lips together like he was trying not to laugh. "You're having a hard time with my face?" 

“Because it keeps changing!”

“Have we met? Hi, Ben Solo, I experience fifty emotions in a span of two minutes,” he said, and Rey pressed a hand to her mouth to laugh. Had she ever heard him make a self-deprecating joke? She didn’t think so. “It’s your assignment. Your vision. I’m just the body you use to depict it.”

She frowned, thinking. If she was going to find out what Ben in his natural state was going to be, then she had to observe him. See what he was like when he wasn’t being the object of her secret affections.

“What are you doing today?” She asked him.

“Nothing,” he shrugged. “My midterms finished early, and I did all my TA stuff yesterday. I was going to go to the laundromat then do some shopping."

“Good,” Rey said, finishing her omelette. “I’ll go with you.”

***

The point of the exercise was to draw Ben while he was doing his chores. Rey could spin that into something about life being a series of chores--surely Holdo would appreciate that.

She already worked on a few—Ben glaring at the spin cycle of the washing machine, trying to remember if he threw in that blue sock Rey could have sworn she saw flying in with his whites, Ben holding up a pair of boxers with pink hearts on them in confusion, swearing that they weren’t his.

Rey was starting to get a hang of his features, too. She liked drawing his nose, the little marks on his face. His hair was always a pleasure, made up of lush sweeping strokes that fell over his eyes. She got it now. The first sketch she’d done of him, he was too broad, too huge, too scary. His face was actually thinner than she imagined, his features softer than what she thought.

She was learning a lot about him, and she didn’t hate it.

“Ben, boxers don’t just accidentally fall into someone’s hamper,” Rey laughed, snapping a photo to send to the others. "I won't judge you for wearing your hearts on your crotch."

“They’re not mine,” Ben insisted. "These are way too small."

“Sure,” she giggled, putting her feet on the chair so she could more closely draw the detail on the boxers. “Can you hold them up again so I can see the hearts?”

He threw them at her, but she didn’t miss the way he was grinning when he did that.

***

“I can tell from today’s selection that you enjoy cooking,” Rey noted, as Ben pushed the shopping cart down the grocery aisle. She was sitting in the cart, being a casual observer/fly in the wall as he did his shopping.She was furiously drawing the current contents of his cart. Ben peeked over her shoulder at her sketchbook, which was fine. Rey wasn’t shy about her art. She used to draw out on the streets, she was used to curious onlookers.

“My nose is not that big,” he said, leaning forward, his breath tickling the back of her neck. “Is it?”

She turned and saw his impossibly long eyelashes almost sweep over his cheek, saw a new angle on that nose and those lush lips. He was smiling.

"Don't move," she said, very quickly sketching an outline of him. "You're moving."

His lip twitched. A couple of minutes later, while telling him a story about Poe vs the vending machine and telling him to stop smiling, Ben stood up to his full height and pushed the cart forward.

"You talk a lot," he noted.

“You’re still not used to it?” Rey asked, finishing a little detail on the pomegranates he’d put in the shopping cart with her. “It helps me think. Tell me about your cooking.”

“I had to learn when I was younger, or else Han and I were going to eat drive thru every night for the rest of our life,” Ben said, a look crossing his face. It was the same expression he had when he’d described his tattoo. Rey should know. It was three sketchbook pages ago.

  
“You guys drive a lot?”

“Used to, in his Falcon,” Ben said, turning over a can of crushed tomatoes and “I think he just liked to drive, and he couldn’t leave me at home. We would eat the most disgusting road food. Fries, chili, cheese. So much cheese."

He made a face, and Rey wanted to hug him.

“So you learned how to cook,” she noted, peeking into the cart again. She noted lots of green veg, fruit, organic things, sauces and other healthy stuff. Lots of fish, too.

“My mom was always out for meetings and rallies, and work, and it was just me and my father. When I was old enough to fend for myself, it was just me.”

The sadness in his eyes broke her heart.

“Eventually my father decided he wanted to stick around again, but he was too late. I’d already left home. He tried going after me, asking me to come back home, but I...I was an asshole, and I kicked him out of my shitty place a couple of times. Then when I finally got my head out of my ass and came back, I was too late.”

“What happened?”

“Heart attack,” he chuckled, like it was the most ironic thing in the known universe. He picked up a can of tomatoes and turned it in his hands, as if he was trying to read the label. “He must have hated it. That such an ordinary, obvious thing would be what got him in the end.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, and it didn't feel like enough. It never felt like enough, and yet there was no other word she could say to tell him how she left for him, how she understood that grief, the hole a person could leave in your heart when they left.

“Don’t be,” he said, turning the can over in his hands again. “Be sorry for my Mom, who misses him every day. Or his best friend Chewie, who was there when he died. I was the disappointment, who left him.”

He was about to put the can of tomatoes in the cart when Rey held a hand up to stop him.

“Not that one,” she said. “The yellow one.”

Ben looked confused for a moment.

“Why?”

“The yellow one is California tomatoes,” Rey explained. “Less carbon footprint, and I actually prefer those tomatoes, they’re more plump and less watery so the flavor is more intense.”

She felt her cheeks heat up, and she knew exactly why. She didn’t really have anyone in her life to talk about this stuff with. Sure her friends ate her food all the time, but when Rey started to talk about how she preferred handmade tortillas to store bought ones, Finn, Poe and Rose could only smile and nod through the best fish tacos ever.

“I’ll take your word for it,” Ben said, putting the can near Rey’s knee.

“And...I hate to be that person who tell you something you might not believe,” Rey said suddenly, feeling the need to comfort him, make him feel a little better. “But your Dad loved you."

"And you know that, because...?"

"He came after you. He did everything he could to bring you home. That’s more than what my parents did for me.”

If he looked surprised, she didn’t know. She hated telling people what had happened to her, but she didn’t want to leave Ben hanging. They always had to one up each other.

“We should cook together,” Rey kept talking, the words falling out of her mouth before she could think about it. Her subject blinked at her, but said nothing. “I mean...I need to keep observing you, of course. And I’m hungry. You’ve got enough ingredients for two, so...”

“Okay,” he said, looking away before she could see the tiny grin on his face. He put his foot on the base of the cart to keep it from moving and held a hand out to help Rey out of it. “I’m making grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup. You pick the stuff for a salad.”

"Deal," she said, taking his proffered hand and standing. She was just thinking about how to get back to ground level when Ben hooked his arm behind her leg and carried her out.

"Oh!" She said, in his arms, the both of them breathing a little too quickly. His lips parted. He looked like he was about to say something when she beat him to the punch. "Salad?"

"Salad," he nodded, letting her down.

***

And that was how Rey ended up in Ben’s surprisingly huge place, waiting for him to finish making the best grilled cheese sandwich in her life, or so he claimed.

His place was perfectly...okay. It looked like a page from an Ikea catalog, perfectly clean and matched, nothing much to indicate that a student was taking a masters in Art History here. There was a photo of Senator Leia Organa in a Christmas sweater scowling at the camera at the place of honor by the fireplace. Next to it, a bunch of books on History (He had a Manet book! HA) were lined perfectly by two bookends. Rey pulled out the one book that didn't seem to fit--a book on mechanics. Huh. She opened the first page, and there was a Post-it still attached inside.

_Don't tell your Mom I gave you the keys to the Falcon. Have fun, kid. _

It was a simple note, but it was always the simple things that hurt most when someone was gone. Rey's heart clenched in her chest, but she smiled, seeing how Ben kept it close.

"I'm almost done here," Ben's voice moved through the quiet space, and it was almost like the apartment wasn't used to so many people in it. Rey jumped a little.

"Right. I'll just wash my hands. Bathroom?"

"Door on the left in the hallway," he said, and the fact that he even had a hallway was nothing short of amazing. Rey found the bathroom easily, but noticed something handing behind the door that made her pause.

It couldn't be. Ben wasn't into...unless he was?

"Why do you have a set of Kylo Ren stencils hanging on your bathroom?" Rey asked, taking one more second to study the framed stencils. They looked completely legit, paint still splattered on the edges where the artist had used it against a wall somewhere. She'd seen one of these go up on auction during her research. This looked like an original frame for Let The Past Die, one of Ren's first pieces, of a man with a bandana over his face throwing a molotov cocktail at Capitol Hill.

"What?" Ben yelled from the kitchen. In the interest of proper conversation, Rey walked to the kitchen, when he looked incredibly focused on plating up their food.

"The Kylo Ren stencils in the bathroom," Rey said, sitting on a bar stool in front of the kitchen counter while Ben added grated parmesan cheese to their soup bowls. "Are those real?"

There was a second where Ben looked like he was debating between telling her the truth or lying. Or maybe he was thinking of telling her not to be nosy. Instead, he shrugged.

"Those are real," he said, not looking up took their loaded plates to the dining table. "I needed something awful to look at while I'm in the bathroom."

"Wow," Rey laughed. "Your dedication to Classical art is intense. Dean Skywalker would hate that."

"Dean Skywalker has a stick of incense stick up his ass," Ben chortled, and Rey blinked at him in surprise. It was the first time she'd heard anyone speak an unkind word against the dean.

"If you hate him so much, why are you in CU?"

"It's home," was all Ben said, shrugging as he carefully stirred his soup. Rey watched him with mild curiosity, wondering if she should push, deciding against it.

"Bon appetit, I guess," she said, taking a bite of the sandwich. "Holy shit?"

It was perfectly crisp outside, with caramelized onions inside. The tomato soup was perfect too, especially with the good tomatoes.

"Really?" Ben asked, as if surprised.

"Yeah, best grilled cheese sandwich of all time," she said, taking another bite. Ben looked pleased, and continued to eat with a little less self-consciousness than he had that morning. "Salad goes really well with it. "

She’d made a salad to go with lunch—mixed greens, a little citrus, olive oil, salt and pepper. Rey blushed, but said nothing. Ben had already asked if he could browse her sketchbook. It was like seeing someone rifle through her heart, but Ben was, as he was in everything else, very careful. She didn't miss the smile on his face as he looked at her work, pointing out moments he recognized, asking about things he didn't. It was...nice.

“So this is your process,” Ben noted, eating his sandwich with a fork (a fork!!). “Very...plein air.”

Rey snorted and dipped her sandwich in the soup bowl. “I learned to draw from doing it on the street. Using anything I had, observing things that moved. All this...formal stuff is actually terrifying.”

She swallowed. She’d worked so hard to enter the university, worked twice as hard to stay in it. Rey never told anyone how difficult it was, how she hadn’t anticipated it to be this hard. There were certain expectations that she just couldn’t seem to meet, things she couldn’t do, and she didn’t want to admit that taking her dream classes in her dream university wasn’t as dreamy as she imagined.

“I look around me and I’m surrounded by all these fantastic artists, and I can’t keep up,” she used the last of her sandwich to clean her bowl. “I didn’t think it would feel so lonely.”

She couldn’t look at him. Not when she felt so exposed and vulnerable, not when she was supposed to be drawing him.

“You’re not alone,” he said almost a little too quickly. Rey looked up just in time to see him spear a bit of sandwich into his mouth. “And there’s nothing wrong with asking for help. You went to Poe when you needed it. I’m only sorry you got me instead.”

“Don’t be,” she smiled. “I’m glad it’s you.”

Her words hung in the air, making her heart feel like someone had stuck Christmas lights in her chest and turned it on.

God. Just the other day she was cursing the ground he walked on. Now he was here, and Rey could think of nothing but kissing him again. It seemed to be a logical conclusion to her, to kiss Ben Solo. She’d been just as vulnerable as he was, she supposed it made sense to want intimacy as a balm for the gaping wounds of their pasts.

Ben stood up from his seat and knelt next to her. The nearness of him made her heart thunder in her chest. Even kneeling, the top of Ben’s head was on her eye level, and his eyes bore into hers.

“Rey,” he said, his eyes flickering to her lips.

“Ben,” she said, and she hated how breathless her voice was.

“I wanted to kiss you, that night,” he said, reaching out and touching the tips of her hair. Rey wanted to lean into his touch, curl up into his hand like a cat, but remained still. She remembered how easily he spooked. “I should have fucking kissed you that night.”

“Yeah. You should have,” she agreed, letting her lips hover close to his, not quite touching. Even if she strained not to do it.

“May I...?"

“Yes,” she said, even if she was the first to capture his lips in hers, the first to slip her tongue in between his lips. Rey cradled his face in her hands, as every neuron in her body lit up and spasmed. It took Ben a second, but his recovery was smoother this time, and he didn’t pull away, but kissed her harder. Kissed her without any trace of the fear or worry she had seen earlier.

Rey wrapped her arms around his neck, twisting in her seat. He tasted like sweet tomatoes and slightly tangy salad dressing, and kissed her like she was the key to breathing.

Without so much as a breath or a warning, Ben scooped her up from her seat, and Rey wrapped her legs around his so her face stayed level to his. His eyes had gone dark again, his lips swollen and his cheeks slightly flushed. He was looking at her like she was the most fantastic thing on the planet.

“Let me fuck you,” he murmured, giving his lips just a moment’s recovery to kiss her neck, to suck at the skin there. "Let me use you."

“This can't be anything else,” she said, a statement of fact, rather than a warning. “You’re okay with that.”

“Please Rey,” there was a catch in his throat when he said that.

“Okay,” she said. The next thing she knew, she was on the couch, his hand pressed against the skin under her shirt as his kisses left a hot trail of fore on her body. Ben lifted her hands over her head, and with own of his massive paws, trapped her wrists above it.

“You could always use a silk scarf, you know,” she teased him.

“Don’t tempt me,” he growled, sucking on the skin of her neck, trailing kisses down her chest, over her sports bra. His free hand slipped under her shirt, under her bra. His fingers were hot as ovens as they brushed her nipple, and Rey's back arched into his touch. She'd moaned. God, she didn't think she could ever moan that obscenely.

"Don't be shy," Ben asked in that damned sexy voice of his, speaking into her ear like he was speaking her into orgasm. "I want to hear you."

He grasped her breast, squeezing. Rey hissed and swore, clutching his shirt. She felt Ben's erection press against her thigh, rubbing against her to ease some of his ache.

"Fuck, I fucking knew you would be loud," Ben said, pulling her close to his erection was between her legs, and she immediately thrust against him. "Fuck."

"Let's see who comes first," she said into his ear, and Ben swore again. And Rey was never going to tell anyone (not even Finn!) about how good Ben Solo was at making her feel good. He'd taken his shirt off. She'd taken hers off, too. His mouth was on her breast, her nails dug into his tattoo. The entire time they were rutting against each other, using each other for their pleasure.

The couch creaked and moved under them, but it was nothing compared to Rey's moaning and Ben describing all the ways he wanted to have her--with his mouth on her little clit, his knuckles deep into her pussy, how he wanted to take her from behind like they had been married for ten years with two kids int he other room--her fantasies were apparently nothing compared to his.

Ben sat up to give them both a little room to fumble. Ben pulled Rey's leggings down, she had a little more difficulty with his pants. His fingers rubbed at her clit as she shamelessly gripped his dick (holy shit, it was huge), pumping him once, twice, five, ten times, spreading leaky precome when her orgasm slammed into her like a freak accident, and she was clutching him, and he was swearing even louder. Her hand was wet, she was wet, and oh my god.

"I win," Ben's chuckle was low and dark in her ear as they maneuvered themselves so he was lying on the couch, and she was lying on his chest, their pants and underwear around their thighs, her hand and his thighs sticky.

"I want a rematch," Rey told him.

"Of course, sweetheart," Ben said, and she pretended she didn't notice him leave a fluttery kiss on her forehead.

Fuck. Rey was in big trouble.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to everyone that's commented and kudos-ed and hit this so far! I'm fairly new to the Reylo fandom, and I feel the love, huhu. 
> 
> Ending this in a couple of chapters, I think, as I am pantsing the hell out of this. I usually have an outline, but the pettiness that fueled this was...well, it was there. Haha.


	4. Chapter 4

“Stop smiling.”

“I’m not,” Ben insisted, even as his cheeks were hurting from smiling. It was like all the time he’d lost from not being able to smile at Rey was coming back with a vengeance, and now he couldn’t keep a his usual, stoic face around her. 

From behind her sketchbook and her chair, Rey’s face was a mask of concentration, the same face she made when he asked her what she wanted to have for breakfast, the same face she made when she had her hand down his pants and focusing on getting him off. Her hands moved over her massive sketchpad with steady efficiency, none of that light sketching nonsense for her. 

“Ben,” she said, her voice dangerously low as she looked at him. “Stop. Smiling.”

“I’ll stop,” he said. But he didn’t. He couldn’t. Not when he was enjoying the view of watching her work. It was one of the privileges of becoming her model that he got to see Rey in her element. 

One of his favorite things about studying Art History was getting in to the nitty gritty of an artist’s process—how Padmè Amidala had painstakingly layered what looked like silly blobs of color to create stunning landscapes, why Yoda’s statues only got better after he lost his eyesight, how Anakin Skywalker’s use of chiaroscuro conveyed a man’s struggle with mental sanity, why it was best shown in Padmés portrait—and he was witnessing Rey’s process firsthand. He already knew that she liked to draw from life, that everything she knew about drawing, she learned from urban sketching. But now with a posed model and a clearer goal in mind, she had to be more precise, leave a more delicate touch. 

And having all that energy focused on Ben was unnerving and stunning and really erotic. 

It was a great thing to watch, even if it meant he had to be completely naked, and slightly hard under his hand. This nude modelling thing was proving to be a lot more difficult than he had initially anticipated. Of course it helped that at first he had volunteered himself because of pettiness—he’d been jealous that Rey chose Poe to model first. His exact thoughts had been, _will this girl really turn to everyone before she even sees me? _He wasn’t too shy to admit that. 

Well, Rey was looking at him now. 

She had a pencil in her mouth, another in one hand, a kneadable eraser and a blender nearby. Her eyes were darting between his body and her work. His cock twitched again, just remembering the feel of Rey’s thighs between his own, the way her hand had grasped and pumped him to orgasm. 

_Stop. Thinking. About. Sex. _

She’d posed him very deliberately, sitting on a chaise lounge that had been gathering dust in the corner of the studio. He’d refused to sit until they got a blanket for it. Ben was lounging completely naked, his left hand covering his genitals while his ankles were lazily crossed. He was sitting up slightly on his elbow, adopting a casual, shameless, come hither mien. Because Ben was Ben, he knew exactly what Rey had been trying to do. 

“Am I _Olympia_?” He asked her, and now it was her turn to smile as she sketched. She seemed to be focused somewhere south of his knees, and Ben tried his best not to twitch. 

“Yes,” Rey said, her smile directed to him now as she walked over to where he was lounging, adjusting the position of his legs just a little bit. He noticed that she was trying _very _hard not to look at his cock. 

“Should I be offended?” Ben asked, as she took a step back. 

“Oh god, I hope not,” Rey smiled, continuing her work. “I told you, I like Manet. The man just wasn’t afraid of showing things as they are—stark and straight to the point.”  


“You don’t have to lie. I know he’s your favorite,” Ben tried to sound bored, but a little rise out of of Rey’s eyebrow made him school his face back into Olympia’s fearless defiance. 

“Olympia changed the art world as we knew it,” Rey shrugged nonchalantly, like she was the one pursuing a master’s degree in Art History. She shifted his chin. Ben would have liked to challenge her on that point, but instead let her continue. It seemed to help her work when he talked to her, and he found that he quite enjoyed talking to her. “Manet took a woman off the street and showed her to the world exactly as she is, glorified a woman working a somewhat dishonest trade and had her placed among religious scenes and mythological creatures because she was worthy of it.” 

“Well, you can’t argue that Manet had…an appreciation of the feminine form,” Ben said, and that was him being generous. Rey moved his hand, accidentally brushing a feather light touch against his cock. Ben cleared his throat and tried to shove the feeling aside. 

“Her image suits you,” Rey continued, returning to her chair. “Not that I’m calling you a whore, or anything. More because you’re honest. You bared yourself to me, quite literally, and you’re not shy about it. I thought the look on her face—defiant and bored at the same time—it reminded me a little of you.” 

“Why Rey, if I didn’t know any better, I would think you were actually paying me a compliment,” Ben said, and as she swept her gaze over his entire body, he couldn’t help but feel like he did when he was a lanky teenager. Too aware of the length of his limbs, the size of his ears, the fact that his nose was getting preposterous. But Rey’s gaze settled on his face, and he felt some of that tension ease. 

“Don’t get used to it,” Rey chuckled, brushing her finger against her paper, and Ben felt an involuntary tingle run up his spine. “I like to think making you pose as a Manet model also serves as revenge for all the horrible things you said about him—“ 

“I wasn’t _horrible—“ _

“It’s poetic justice,” she said. “And very impressive, from any angle.”

Good to know that some things would never change between them. 

She continued to work, keeping them both entertained with a steady stream of conversation. 

“How can an art history major not appreciate Dadaism?” Rey snorted about fifteen minutes, shaking her head as she kept her eyes focused on her work. 

“I just don’t,” Ben scoffed, tossing his head. “Call me an elitist—“

“Elitist.”

He narrowed his eyes at her, and she wasn’t looking at him, but it made her laugh anyway. “But once Marcel Duchamp made his point about ready-mades and how silly everyone was being, it was done. The rest was just surrealism in Switzerland.”

“Remind me never to invite you to a modern art exhibit,” Rey said, but Ben was in too deep to stop talking. This was the kind of thing that got him in trouble all the time. “You’d be the kind of person who mocks the whole thing.”

“There’s nothing wrong with having an opinion,” he shrugged, and was surprised when Rey suddenly stood up, and crossed her arms, looking down at where he was lying. For a brief second, Ben panicked. Had he crossed a line with her? Was she upset? It had been easier to act like he thought she was beneath him, easier to lash out and be annoyed. Easier, but not better. His therapist said that life was about constantly trying to improve yourself. So here he was. Trying. 

She walked across the studio, looking a little worn out, but still smiling. She sat at the edge of the lounge, her back to his thighs. Ben moved to sit up a little more to give her room, but she stopped him. She was so beautiful in this light. 

Rey placed her hand on his thigh and leaned forward so their noses were touching. Then she down at him with those stunning forest green eyes, the eyes that he wanted to lose himself in. 

“What am I going to do with you, Solo?” She asked, and Ben swallowed thickly. He was totally at her mercy. Naked and exposed, hers to take or leave as she wanted.

Ben said nothing, merely looking up at her. A soft smile played on the edges of Rey’s lips, and his heart felt like it was fluttering in his chest. There was a brief second where he thought he was having a panic attack, but he was feeling too happy for that. 

Then she bent forward and kissed him. Ben’s hand caught her face right away, not wanting her to leave, wanting to make this moment last. Kissing Rey was just another thing he was going to be better at, even if it meant him laying naked and exposed underneath her. 

She turned her head, and Ben sat up a little higher, his free arm looping around her wait to bring her closer. But still it wasn’t close enough. He wanted more. More of her, more of how she made him feel. Rey’s hand was on his chest, and it curled, scratching skin. Ben hissed, but was so turned on he could seem to see straight. He was gasping for breath, about to ask her if she wanted to do this, when...

“Oh! It’s occupado. Whoops,” Poe’s voice cut through the heat, and Ben scrambled, grabbing the nearby blanket and throwing it over his half-hard cock. Motherfucking Poe Dameon. Ben loved the guy, but really… “Ben! Rey! Nice to see the two of you, uh…working hard.” 

“Poe,” Rey said, and Ben wanted to believe that she grit her teeth just as hard as him. He hoped to god Poe didn’t suspect that they were doing anything less than artistic in the studio. But one look at the boy’s shit eating grin told Ben that it was pointless to hope. He threw them one last wink before he hollered over his shoulder. 

“It’s fine, Luke, they were just wrapping up,” Poe chuckled, stepping to the side to reveal Luke Skywalker looking equal parts confused, disappointed and amused. Ben did not have the best relationship with his uncle, and he did _not _need him looking at Ben like it was the first time he’d ever laid eyes on his nephew. 

“Hello nephew,” He said, his lips pressed together like the asshole was trying his hardest not to smile. “I see you’ve made a career out of that summer job from a few years back. Poe and I were just looking for a good spot to hold a sculpting masterclass for the summer. Maz Kanata finally agreed to come and teach.”

“We’ll get out of your way, then,” Rey said, standing up very suddenly and walking stiffly toward her chair, the epicenter of her safe zone, and hastily started packing up her things. 

“Oh, don’t rush,” Luke assured her, shaking his head. “We just wanted to be sure that the room was still in usable condition and in good light. And it is, which, wonderful.” 

He walked deeper into the room, walked over to where Rey had stopped, seemingly transfixed by Luke. Ben wanted to roll his eyes and throw something at his uncle. Instead, he hastily grabbed his pants and pulled them on so fast that Poe (who was very obviously trying to see what kind of heat he was packing) barely had time to catch a glimpse of his bare ass. 

“I’m looking forward to seeing the result of your work, Rey,” Luke said, giving Rey a good natured smile, before he turned and practically swept out of the room. He gave Ben a little mock salute. “Ben. I’ll see you at Leia’s this weekend.”

Ben said nothing, but watched his uncle leave the room. Poe said something to Rey and followed the dean of the Fine Arts Department out of the room. Ben turned to Rey, who was still very hastily packing her bag, her cheeks flushed pink. 

This was it. She was going to bolt. She was going to run and tell him this was a bad idea, that she couldn’t handle this. She was going to ask about this weekend. 

Instead, she turned and raised an eyebrow at him. 

“Can’t you put on a shirt or something?” She asked. “The diner may be a bit of a rag, but they have a strict shirts-on policy there.” 

He had to tread carefully. Who knows what Rey was thinking? 

“Are we…having breakfast?” He asked her. 

“Of course,” Rey grinned, although the smile didn’t quite reach her eyes. She held a hand out to him. “Pancakes?” 

“Is that a pet name, or a breakfast suggestion,” Ben chuckled, throwing on a shirt and taking her hand. Rey slipped their clasped hands into the back pocket of his jeans. 

“It’s whatever you want it to be, Ben,” she sighed, and together they walked out of the studio, and had breakfast with no mention of the incident. If Ben was a less paranoid person, he would say that everything was fine and things could go on as normal. 

But unfortunately, he was. And like it or not, them brushing this issue aside hit him in the chest, in that soft place in his heart that he didn’t realize he still had. He shouldn’t have any soft parts left, but here it was, slightly crushed around the edges. He knew something had changed for Rey that moment they were caught. And he had no right to ask her what it was. The scavenger girl was never going to tell him. 

“Tell me about your art,” he said instead, taking a sip of his black coffee. “I know you said you learned with urban sketching.”

“Not by choice,” Rey snorted, scarfing down her usual spinach omelette. “It was what was in front of me when I was growing up. I drew the things I saw, because I had nothing of my own. And, I guess I’ll always carry that quality with me. I’ll still be stuck in my past, even if I want my art to be about belonging.”

Ben shook his head. “Don’t say that. You can’t be stuck in the past. You have to keep moving forward. It’s pointless to linger in it.”

Rey stopped eating, confusion in her face as she looked at him. Ben tried to keep a cool veneer, but inside, he’d wondered if he’d said the wrong thing again. Was he always going to wonder if he was saying the wrong thing around her? 

“How so?” She asked lightly. 

“I could spend the rest of our relationship trying to make up for that night we met, but instead, I’m trying to move on with you,” he said, trying to keep his voice straight. “I could dwell in the fact that I’ve broken my mother’s heart a thousand times, and disappointed her a thousand times more, but instead I’m fighting tooth and nail to move on and be there for her.”

She nodded, and that simple action made Ben’s heart clench in his chest. When was the last time someone just…understood him so well? 

“We carry our past with us,” she said. “Because it’s why we want a better future, so we can leave it behind. And sometimes it makes me feel...”

Rey squeezed his hand over the table, and Ben would have hung the moon for her if she asked.

“You’re not alone,” he said before she could finish her sentence m, because he knew. He understood. “You have Poe and Finn, and Rose.”

“And you,” Rey smiled as bright as the sun. “I have you.”

* * *

He should have known that Poe and Luke walking in on him and Rey was going to make it to the nation’s capital before noon.

Leia called him at 10:20, just in time for the end of his class. Ben dismissed his students with a wave and a final reminder that he was going to be exacting about their papers on the Renaissance in Florence and Rome before he picked up his phone. 

“Mother, I’m disappointed in you,” he said, tucking his phone between his shoulder and ear as he packed up his laptop and its attachments. “It’s been at least three hours since the incident occurred. Slowing down?”

“Oh get your head out of your cockpit, Ben,” Leia said, but he could hear the mirth in her voice, could practically imagine his mother smiling as she strode down the halls of the Capitol. “And you’re in a good mood. I take it I should prepare an extra bed for the weekend?” 

“No, no, there’s no need,” he assured her, moving out of the classroom, and giving Professor Mothma a nod as he passed her in the doorway. She was taking over the classroom after him. Her lecture on Art and Revolution was one of the more fascinating in the university, and Ben was only slightly jealous of the students who got to experience it for the first time. Finn once joked that the reason Mothma delivered this class so well was because she was old enough to live through the times she was describing. Ben didn’t think that was inaccurate, but he wasn’t about to give Finn the satisfaction.

“Really? So Poe _didn’t _catch you making out with the artist doing a figure drawing of you naked as the day I birthed you,” she deadpanned.

“You shouldn’t believe everything Poe tells you.”

“Why not? The boy’s never told me a lie before,” she shrugged, and the old Ben would have yelled at her and accused her of wanting gorgeously curly haired Golden Boy Poe Dameron to be her son instead, but Ben was past that. “And I want to see you happy, Ben. I miss seeing you happy.”

Her words were so simple and sweet, sincere and loving, but in the face of everything, seemed like talking about an impossibility. Ben had never even contemplated any kind of happiness fo himself before. He was just starting to believe in it now. And right now, he couldn’t see it with anyone else but the girl who saw right into his soul, and didn’t recoil in horror. 

He inhaled sharply. 

“Me too,” he said.

“I’ll see you Friday night. I’ll be the lady in the blue dress.”

“I’ll be the guy with all the emotional baggage,” he said, actually making his his mother laugh before he hung up the phone. Some conversations were easier than others. 

He was about to slip his phone back into his pocket when he got a text from Rey. 

_Victorine Meurent was Manet’s model for Olympia, and his favorite. She also painted for the Salon. I think it’s extra fitting that we chose her. _

He grinned, and texted back as he walked to the teacher’s lounge. 

_I like the sound of that we. But does this mean I’m your favorite? _

His phone rang. It was her. He answered the call and said nothing. 

“I’ll never admit it in public,” she said.

“But you’re willing in private?” He asked, slipping in to his tiny office, leaning against the closed door. “Where are you?” 

“In bed,” she told him. “My morning class cancelled.”

“What are you wearing?” He asked, his voice suddenly low and rough, and he knew the question was a risk. But he couldn’t help it. She brought it out in him. 

There was a pause. Ben held his breath.

“What do you think I’m wearing?” she asked, and Ben pressed a hand to the speaker of his phone so she couldn’t hear him sigh in relief. He locked the door behind him. “I could just be wearing a bra and panties.”

“Or you could just be wearing a bra,” he said, his imagination going wild—the image of Rey lying in her bed without underwear, thinking of him, and smiling and flushing red the way she did, even when she was being the most brazen girl in the room. 

“Why would I just be wearing a bra? Why can’t I be naked?”

“Because if you were naked, I would be the one taking your clothes off,” was his simple explanation. “But this is enough. For now.”

“Mm. Full of ourselves, are we?”

“You like it,” he chuckled, and he noticed she didn’t disagree. “Now where were we?”

“Discussing my nakedness.”

“Mhm. You could be waking up from a dream about me.” 

“Oh,” Rey said, her voice damnably soft. He couldn’t have imagined her purring. “What were we doing in the dream?” 

“We’re in bed. The two of us. You in my arms, my fingers fondling your clit as I bite a little on your skin,” the words slipped easily from his tongue, and Ben would be lying if he said he hadn’t pictured this scenario before. “I’m behind you. Holding on to your thigh as you shake and tremble against my hand.” 

“And do I…like it?” Her voice caught in her throat for a second, and he heard the sheets rustling. 

“You do,” he said, brushing his free hand over the front of his pants, his cock stiff and hard and begging for Ben’s attention. But he focused on the goal at hand. This was about Rey, her pleasure. “I know how you like it. Slow, steady pressure. You want the kind of touch that builds up, the kind that never gives you enough, but you crave anyway. You want my fingers inside you. You want my thumb on your clit, so feather light it’s like torture. You want to fuck my hand until your body bursts into flames.”

“Yes. Fuck. Yes.”

“Touch yourself, Rey. Make sure I hear it.”

She gasped, then moaned, low and keening. He directed her movement, imagining her hand between her legs, bringing herself to orgasm. 

“You’re mine, sweetheart,” Ben said, gritting his teeth and groaning as Rey’s orgasm hits her, her screams crystal clear over the phone line. It took her a while to come down from that high, but she didn’t hang up. 

“Your turn,” she said, and now it her her voice that was husky and smooth. She was still a little breathless, and Ben wished she was here. Wished she was kneeling in front of him, her green eyes smoldering with beat and desire as she undid the front of his pants. 

“Mm,” he groaned, dropping his head back against the door. The thought of the door being the only thing separating him from the outside only made it hotter. “I do like my turn.”

“Good,” Rey said, and he could almost hear how evil her smile was. “Be here in ten minutes. Bring condoms.”

Then she hung up. Ben gave himself a moment to curse before he grabbed his wallet, phone, keys and headed right out the door. Gotta love a girl who knew exactly whet she wanted.

* * *

Ben could get used to this. Lying in bed with Rey, flushed and sweaty and post-sex happy. Rey was a cuddler, and right now she was draped over his body like a very naked baby panda. They waited for their breaths to even and slow, and Ben pictured living like this for the rest of his life. He imagined waking up with Rey on different, ordinary days. Sometimes they had clothes on, sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes she kick off the sheets, sometimes he woke up breathing in the scent of her hair.

It would be a good life, if he lived like that with her.

“I have to go to class,” Rey said, turning her head so her forehead was pressed to his chest, and Ben wrapped his arms around her. “Fuck, you trapped me.”

“I know,” he said, his eyes drooping. Sex always wore him out. 

Rey wriggled. He chuckled and held her closer. “Guess you have to cut class.”

“I can’t, it’s Holdo’s class,” She groaned, pressing her face into his chest again anyway. “I have to show her my progress on your drawing.”

“Have to,” he snorted. “You don’t have to do anything.”

“I do, though,” Rey chuckled, wriggling again. “Now unhand me, sir.”

“You know it’s twice as sexy because of your accent,” Ben sighed, letting his arms fall open so Rey could roll off of him and get ready. “Will I see you tonight?”

He didn’t see it, but Rey’s face had changed, but only for a second. 

“I might have to finish a paper tonight,” she said nonchalantly. “I’ll call you.”

She was long gone by the time Ben emerged from her room, throwing on his shirt.

“Afternoon delight?” Poe asked from where he was standing in the kitchen, eating Lucky Charms from a bowl sans milk. “Rey was looking particularly well fucked as she walked out the door.”

“Butt out, Poe,” Ben grumbled, sitting across from him and accepting the bowl, spoon and milkoffered to him. 

“Butt out? Are we five again?” 

“Well, one of us is eating cereal without milk, so I guess we are,” Ben grumbled, spooning a heap of sugary breakfast treats into his mouth. Mmm. Capitalism.

“But seriously, Ben,” Poe said, leaning his hip against the nearest available surface as he continued to eat dry cereal, except now he was only eating the marshmallows. “You and Rey. I’m happy for you, buddy, but are you sure you’re both on the same page?”

“What is that supposed to mean?” Ben asked, his tone sharper than he intended. 

“Just...” Poe chewed thoughtfully on a dehydrated marshmallow. If such a thing was even possible. “I get a sense that the two of you want different things in a relationship. You’re more of a lone wolf. Rey’s...not.”

“Fuck off Poe,” Ben snapped. “Mind your own business.”

“I’m just trying to be a friend.”

“Then be a friend!” Ben nearly shouted. “Fuck. You know Finn’s friends didn’t like me when they first met me...”

“I know, I know,” Poe nodded, and Ben hated that he didn’t hate Poe for brushing things aside like that. “And now Finn likes you. Rey obviously does too. Jury’s still out on Rose, though.”

Ben winced. He and Rose were never going to get along, but the unspoken agreement that they were civil was more than enough for now.

“I just don’t want you to get hurt,” Poe explained, and Ben nodded, murmuring “thank you” so low and quiet he wasn’t sure if Poe heard him. “Now finish your cereal.”

* * *

Amylin Holdo was a stickler for technique. In class, she emphasized realism, wanting to see emotions on their subject’s faces, needed the artist to study every freckle, every flaw. It meant she also had the most discerning eye and the best taste, which made her one of the best teachers to learn from.

Rey shifted her weight from one foot to the other, wishing she could pace as Holdo studied her sketches. She could barely see her face, just the halo of Holdo’s soft purple hair. Rey longed to know what she was thinking. Growing up in the foster system had taught her the value of patience—good things came when you sat still and waited as long as was needed.

Amylin lowered the sketched and beamed at Rey. Oh Rey could have committed that beaming smile to paper, because she was pretty happy about it too.

“This is really excellent work,” Amylin nodded, smiling as she spoke, laying Rey’s sheets over the table. There were initial sketches of the various poses she tried before she landed on Olympia, then detailed close ups of her favorite parts of Ben—his hands, his arms, those soulful eyes. “You really have an eye for this, Rey. I can read him in your work, I feel like I know him. And I actually do.”

She gave a little chuckle at her own joke. But really, was there any faculty members on campus that _didn’t_ know Ben Solo? Rey was aware that he was a Skywalker, and that the name was practically synonymous with the campus, but still. Did he really have to occupy a lot of her thoughts? Did she really have to wonder if he napped in her bed without her, or if he left right away?

She pushed those thoughts aside. No. She didn’t have time for this. She had plates to do, readings to catch up on. 

She was so caught up in her thoughts that she almost missed Holdo telling her the biggest compliment she would have ever hoped to receive in her life.

“I think you’re in exactly the right place. You belong here,” Holdo said, and the words made Rey gasp and tears fill her eyes very suddenly. “Whatever you’re doing that inspires you like this, keep at it. I’m excited fo see your progress.”

She left Holdo’s office floating on a cloud of happiness and belonging. Oddly enough there was only one person she wanted to call. What an odd feeling. 

Rey slipped into an empty classroom and tried to process the emotion. The last two years of listening to Rose wax poetic about psychology and post-trauma behaviors had taught Rey nothing about specifics, just the importance of taking a beat to recognize her feelings. 

She wanted to talk to Ben. Share this little triumph with him. Not just because he was the subject of her work, but because he understood why it hadn’t been easy for her. Understood how important it was to her that she belonged to a place like this. 

But with the happiness came the worry. She worried that she was leaving herself too vulnerable, too exposed to him possibly hurting her. God knew that he’d already done it before, and now Rey was in too deep to just walk away and pretend that he didn’t have the potential to devastate her. 

She shook her head. She’d told him that she didn’t want commitment. He got that. He knew that. So Rey wasn’t going to stress about it. It was just a call between friends who happened to have the hottest sex of their lives together. Nothing to it. 

“It’s too early for a booty call,” He answered on the second ring. From the honk of a car in the background, and something vaguely classical in the background, Rey guessed that he was driving. “Unless you just missed me.”

Rey snorted. “I plead the Fifth.” 

“That’s the most American thing I think I’ve ever heard you say, sweetheart,” Ben chuckled, and she could almost picture him being pulled away from whatever he was doing, leaning his massive body against a seat that was probably a tad too small for him. 

“Where are you?” 

“Running an errand for someone who is going to owe me big time,” he said.

“I just wanted to say. Holdo really likes me work. She thinks I have a great eye,” she released a breath that she didn’t realize she had been holding. But telling Ben actually made her feel even better. Lighter. Happier. “But we still have a lot of work to do. I’m still not totally sold on how I’m doing your feet.”

“Doing my feet, huh,” Ben said, and she could almost hear in his voice that he was absolutely beaming for her. Rey sucked in a breath and placed a hand on her chest as if to soothe her heart. Too much. Too happy. She couldn’t handle it. “But that’s wonderful, Rey. I knew you would be amazing. We should celebrate tonight.”

“Tonight?” She gasped, wondering why she felt like she was suffocating, but oddly happy about it. 

“I’ll come over. My mother sent an old recipe of my grandmother’s from her hometown. I hope you like smashed potatoes.” 

“I do, actually. Send me a grocery list. I’ll make chicken, maybe,” Rey said, surprised at how quick she was to volunteer for the cause. Surprised at how easy it was to fit someone into her life, even if it terrified her. 

“I’ll see you tonight, sweetheart.”

“See you,” Rey managed to say, hanging up as she tried to slow her thundering heart. She let Ben’s voice linger in her mind. She liked the way he called her sweetheart. It fit her much better than scavenger, anyway. 

She’d lived her entire life alone. That wasn’t about to change. Love and attachment was only a temporary thing for her anyway. She wasn’t attached to Ben. No way. 

* * *

Rey was singing along to Lizzo an hour later as she entered her apartment, laden with ingredients for tonight. She placed the bags on the counter and started to unload everything. Ben’s list had been substantial, and oddly specific—really good quality Yukon gold potatoes, Morton or Diamond Crystal salt (Rey had never had to pay so much for salt), anchovies, golden raisins, walnuts, a lemon, Aleppo-style pepper flakes, parsley, dill and a specific sour cream that he liked. 

It took Rey a few rounds around the store to figure out what she wanted to make, but ended up finding the perfect thing when she passed by a random farmer’s market on the way back. So along with the yellow potatoes and the little touches of green Ben was planning to put…somewhere along the way, she was going to make poached cod in tomato curry. Something red to match. 

She was just putting the basil and other herbs in a cup full of water by the counter to keep fresh when a familiar face emerged from the hallway. 

“You’re in a good mood,” Rose Tico grinned, and Rey immediately dropped everything she was doing to give Rose a huge bear hug. Rose had spent the summer semester in Vietnam, doing some kind of exchange program for something psychology related that Rey definitely didn’t understand. She looked a little more sun-kissed than usual, and a little fuller, but happy. It was definitely nice to have her back. 

“You didn’t tell us you were coming back today!” Rey said, holding her friend at arm’s length as if to make sure that she was really there. Her heart swelled, and she couldn’t believe it. She was just…overwhelmingly glad to have her back. Because maybe some part of her thought she was never going to. “I could have picked you up at the airport…”

“And spoil the surprise?” Rose chuckled. “No way. Ben picked me up.”  


Rey blinked at Rose once. Twice. Three times. Rose and Ben didn’t get along,even at the best of times. Hell, Finn had took a class with Ben in his first year and had much more reason to hate him.

If Rey saw Ben as an opponent to verbally spar with whenever they were in five feet of distance of each other, Rose saw Ben as a bear and proceeded to poke him every chance she got. She claimed that she wasn’t handling him with kid gloves, is all. Rey didn’t actually think that they got along, in any circumstance. 

“He did?” 

“Well, he had a car,” Rose shrugged, skipping past Rey to look at the spread of food. “Oh god, potatoes and sour cream. American food. I missed it. Not that I didn’t go hungry in Vietnam. I don’t actually think I’ll be able to eat Pho here anymore, the ones in Ho Chi Minh were just _amazing_. Oh, I have presents!” Rose exclaimed in almost one breath, dashing back to her room. Rey grinned and watched her friend go back to her room. 

Maybe people who left can come back, sometimes. 

* * *

“This is weird,” Finn said, shaking his head as he sat on the reupholstered lazy boy Rey had upcycled from someone’s trash. “Like, really weird.”

“What’s weird, babe?” Poe asked, handing Finn an open beer before he plopped on his boyfriend’s lap, Finn’s face still hilariously stern as he and Poe loved it up on the seat together. 

“Rey and Ben. Cooking. Together. It’s…weird,” he said, taking a swig of his beer as the two moved around the kitchen like they did this kind of thing everyday. Rose was sitting next to them and watching the spectacle as well. 

“Shut up, it’s not weird, it’s destiny,” she sighed, leaning back against her seat. “You should have seen the two of them that night in the club. Sparks were flying everywhere. This is, like, inevitable.”  


“I don’t see it that way,” Finn muttered darkly. 

“Because you see Rey as your little sister and think she needs protecting,” Rose rolled her eyes, popping a nacho into her mouth. Ben made nachos. “But look at her. Look at the two of them. They’re happy.”

She’d been in the car with Ben when Rey called, and Rose had heard the entire exchange between them, managing to keep her mouth shut for the duration of the conversation as she learned that the two immovable, lonely rocks in her life had finally found each other. It was a sign that things were good that Ben didn’t even flinch or cringe when he realized that their little celebration tonight was going to have a few more people in it. 

“But is it going to work, you think?” Poe asked, whispering as Rey hip checked as he assembled his smashed potato dish, and Ben didn’t move an inch, raising his eyebrows instead in challenge. “I mean, look at them. Ben clearly doesn’t think this is permanent, and Rey is really, really into him.”  


Finn and Rose stared at him blankly. 

“What?” 

“It’s the other way around, babe,” Finn pointed out.

“Yeah. Rey has abandonment issues so she has a hard time letting people in, and Ben just wants love that he’s got a tendency to cling,” Rose pointed out, just as Ben leaned over to whisper something into Rey’s ear, making her blush and swat him with her hand. All three of them didn’t miss the way he seemed to sniff her hair as she turned away from him. “See.” 

“So that’s why _that _is a disaster waiting to happen,” Poe pointed out, for once being the pragmatic Tio in the group. “Those two have like, one brain cell between them, and they’re going to butt heads about it, and the three of us will be in the middle.”  


“I get Rey in the divorce,” Finn announced. Rose rolled her eyes. 

“It’s not like the both of you have more than one brain cell scraped together,” she argued. “And who knows? Those two idiots might surprise us.”

Finn and Poe both looked like they sincerely doubted that. They doubted it even more when Ben said goodnight, and very obviously whispered, ‘think of me tonight,’ in Rey’s ear before he left. 

“What,” Rey asked the three of them as she started to clear the plates. 

“What, what? What nothing,” Poe shrugged, taking over. There was an agreement in the shared apartment that whoever did the cooking didn’t have to do the cleaning. 

“What dummy one Kenobi over here is trying to say,” Rose giggled, pulling Rey to the couch next to her. “Is that we just wanted to ask what this thing with Ben is. Are you guys in love, or?” 

“Oh, god no,” Rey said, her face immediately blushing red as she looked away from Rose. “He knows it’s just an affair.” 

“How?” 

“I told him.”

Had Rey been Rose’s patient, she would ask something to the effect of controlling the people around us also being a way of pushing them away, that by telling Ben what they were left no room for finding out what he wanted, because clearly, the man wanted her. 

“And you’re sure it’s just sex?” 

“Of course it is,” Rey huffed. 

* * *

Which is why that evening, she snuck out of the apartment and showed up at Ben’s door in a coat and nothing else.

“Fuck,” Ben said, his eyes wide at the sight of her. “Fuck, Rey, I…I could draw you like this.” 

“Private sketching session?” Rey joked, sauntering past him in the door, feeling just a little bit silly but wildly sexy in the nicest lingerie she owned. She’d purchased them on a whim, for a special occasion, and the Seduction of Ben Solo seemed like a special occasion. 

“I could. You don’t know how much I want to,” he said, capturing her lips in his in a quick kiss, like he couldn’t resist. She felt a little smug about the fact that he couldn’t resist. “But I have proposal to write, I forgot it was due.”

“Oh,” Rey’s face fell. “I should go, then.”

“No, no, stay,” He said, reaching out to grasp her waist, and her skin tingled as his large, warm hands smoothed over the skin near her abdomen. He kissed her again. “I’d be an idiot to let you walk out the door looking like sex on a stick.”

“Sex on a stick,” Rey repeated, laughing. “I’ll stay, but can I borrow a shirt? And pants?”

“British pants or…?”

“Whatever you have,” she sighed, taking her coat off and tossing it aside. Ben stood in the middle of the room staring at her fully exposed body, at the fishnet stockings and the fuck-me-hard stiletto heels Rey had stashed in the back of the closet. 

“Motherfucker,” he said, taking off his shirt instead. “I have thirty minutes.”  


“Hmm, I think we’ll only need five,” Rey giggled, jumping into his arms, squeezing her thighs around him. “Take me to bed, Solo.”

* * *

They ended up needing forty five minutes. Rey had come so hard and so loud she could swear she’d set off someone’s car alarm when Ben said something about nailing her to the mattress and destroying it with his come. Jesus. 

Now they were on the couch like nothing happened. Rey, now wearing Ben’s shirt and a clean pair of boxers, was watching a Spanish telenovela on his Netflix account with her toes tucked under his butt. Meanwhile, Ben was completely focused on his work, writing notes in a notebook like it was 1994. 

“Oi gramps, we should turn on a lamp so you don’t ruin your eyesight,” Rey giggled, wiggling her toes under his butt, making him jump slightly. 

“Come to DC with me,” Ben said, in a surprisingly small voice. 

“What?” Rey asked, her entire body freezing and going into panic mode. Shit. Shit. Shit. 

“I go most weekends to see my mother. I think she’d love to meet you,” Ben shrugged, a feeble attempt at nonchalance, when his face was clearly in agony over trying to read Rey’s reaction. 

This was the exact opposite of just sex. This wasn’t what Rey wanted. If she went to DC with Ben, it would mean that they were something, and it would mean that one day he could—would break her heart. Nothing was meant to last, anyway. 

“I…can’t,” she said, the words falling out were the bricks with which she built a wall around herself, away from him. “It’s midterm season, and I’ve been so focused on this figure drawing class, but I still have tests with my other classes, and I really should start looking for a part time job…” 

“Oh,” he said, and his entire face fell. Rey wanted to hug him, but shoved the impulse away, and deep in her soul. “Next time, maybe.”  


“Yeah, maybe,” she said, looking back at the TV and resuming the show. She didn’t miss noticing that Ben didn’t go back to work, just stared at the screen like he knew what was going on. 

She’d hurt him. Shit, she’d hurt him. 

But maybe it was for the best. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One more chapter to go! You know, I actually expected more nudity, but really, we don't want Rey to be, um, unprofessional. And Rose is the unexpected badass of the story, who knew? 
> 
> Hope you guys liked this chapter!


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's all she wrote, quite literally! I've never been good at endings or closing conflicts, I just wanted these two space dummies to get together :(( But that being said, I hope you guys enjoyed this little petty-fueled fanfic. I'll see you guys around the Reylo tag here on Ao3 ;)

It was their last sketching session. Rey’s last chance to have unfettered access to Ben’s body—in the most artistic, professional way possible. Rey had previously entertained fantasies of that last session. She pictured the two of them laughing and joking together, speaking with that new ease and comfort that replaced their old hostility. She pictured her announcing she was done, and Ben grinning in that unselfconscious, too bright way he did when he forgot that other people were looking. 

She imagined making love to him on the chaise lounge that she’d been sketching him from, imagined his hips bucking against hers as that thick, luscious mouth of his left trails of kisses on her neck, and chest.

But expectations very rarely met reality, and Rey should have known better.

On their last sketching session, the tension was so thick she could have cut it with a knife and parted it with her bare hands. Ben had taken off his clothes with zero self-consciousness and careless efficiency, almost like he was completely over the whole process. Rey wanted to huff. She knew she’d hurt him by rejecting his weekend invitation, but really. This was a little…_much. _

Thank god she was just doing a few finishing touches, and she didn’t need Ben to be happy, she just needed his body to stay exactly the way she needed it to. 

Silence ticked on as ten, twenty, thirty minutes passed. Ben didn’t say a word, and Rey’s patience was wearing ice thin. 

_Just one more detail, _she told herself. _One more detail and we can be done with this whole thing. _

But as she told herself that, a cold chill ran down her spine. If she let Ben leave today, she had a horrible feeling that she was never going to see him again, never going to get a chance to fix…whatever this was. Because it certainly wasn’t a relationship. 

Wasn’t it? 

“Fuck,” she muttered under her breath. Ben’s brow rose a fraction, but he schooled his face into cold impassivity again. He was good at that. 

“So you’re really just going to act like a callous bitch and pretend nothing happened last night?” He asked, his question slicing through the tension, burning it all down, leaving Rey’s heart in tattered shreds. Fucking. Hell.

“Nothing happened last night,” Rey huffed, keeping her eyes focused on her work. She wasn’t going to rise to the bait. Ben was trying to get her mad, and the moment she did, _he_ would flare up. So she tried to stay calm. “We had sex. Like we always do.”

“I asked you to come with me to DC and you made some bullshit excuse about midterms.”

“Are you calling me a liar?” She snapped, but took it back right away, shaking her head to calm herself. “I told you why I couldn’t go.”  


“Bullshit,” Ben’s curse word was snappy and chomped at the last reserves fo Rey’s patience. “I need a reason, Rey. A _real _reason.”

That did it.

“I said no because I don’t have to meet your mother,” she said, and if she really want to stick a knife into his chest and ram him against a wall with it, she could have said ‘want to meet your mother,’ but while she was callous, she wasn’t cruel. “You don’t meet the mom of the guy you’re fucking around with.”

“So that’s all this is,” he said, Ben’s face, if possible, went darker. Closed off even more. A storm was brewing in the man’s eyes, and Rey wanted to kiss away the anger on his brow, the hard set of his jaw. She resisted the urge. “Fucking around?”  


“Did you seriously think we were in a relationship?” She scoffed. “You’re my subject.”

“Your subject?” He hissed. “Not even a friend?” 

This was it. All Rey had to do was say the right words, and this could be over. She could cut everything off. Cut him off like she did everything in her life. _We were never friends. Just say it. We were never friends._

But she couldn’t. She couldn’t lie to him. Because he was her friend. Her friend who knew that she sometimes forgot to salt her food, her friend who knew when to take her seriously, who knew how she sometimes enjoyed silence. Her friend who could make her come with a few non-verbal instructions.

Her friend who meant the world to her, and she was hurting him even more. 

Rey retreated. Surrendered. She couldn’t do this. 

She looked at her work.

“I’m done,” she said, refusing to look at him. If she looked at him, she would give him the opportunity to hurt her even more than she had already hurt him. “I’m done.”

“You’re a coward,” Ben shook his head, rising from the couch like he hadn’t laid down in the same position for forty five minutes straight. He stood up to his full height, his whole body open and exposed to her. And Rey couldn’t look up. “Sweetheart. You can’t even look at me.”

Rey’s insides clenched, like she’d been the one who was stabbed in the gut and rammed against the wall. 

“Please.”

It broke her. She wanted nothing more than to run into his arms and apologize and tell him that everything was going to be fine, that they were going to be together forever. 

But she couldn’t give him that. She didn’t know how. And she didn’t want to disappoint him. 

“Thank you for your help in this assignment, Ben. It means a lot to me.”

He snorted. Rey gathered her belongings and found herself wincing every time Ben so much as breathed. She knew this feeling. She was bracing for an attack, bracing rejection, bracing getting hurt. She could dish it, but she couldn’t take it. She never could. 

Isn’t this what she wanted? No attachments? No closeness? Why did it feel like the wrong thing? 

She left the room before Ben could put on a shirt, taking her fragile little heart with her.

***

Ben glared at the blank wall in front of him, keeping his arms wrapped around himself to quell the itch in his hands—the itch to grab paint and use the wall that wasn’t his, to leave his mark on it. To destroy it a little bit. 

He shook his head. He wasn’t that guy anymore, and even if he wanted nothing more than to take paint and throw it over the pristine white wall in his anger and disappointment, he knew it wasn’t going to do much of anything. 

He’d lost Rey. According to her, he never really had her, which was bullshit. They had something, the two of them. She knew it. He certainly knew it. 

But he wasn’t going to force her if she wasn’t ready. 

Ben turned his heel and walked away. He pulled out his phone, and quickly purchased an Amtrak ticket. He needed to get out of here. 

***

Rey’s feet felt heavy. Her entire body felt heavy, and even then she felt like it was missing a phantom part of herself. 

Like Ben had taken it away from him. 

Which didn’t even make sense! He was her _subject. _Her assignment. Ridiculous. 

She opened the door to Holdo’s office. For an artist with light lavender hair, the entire room was neat as a pin, clean and pristine, which was always a shock to see in a department run by, let’s face it, hippies. 

“Rey,” Holdo’s smile was beatific as she walked in. “I was wondering when you were going to come in.”

“Oh, I can come back,” she said, when she realized that the dean, Luke Skywalker was also sitting in the office. The man had the odd ability of blending into the corners. “Sorry.”

“No, no we were waiting for you, actually,” Holdo said, making grabby hands toward her sketchbook. “I wanted him to see your work with Mister Solo.” 

“I’ve heard nothing but good things,” Luke said, a wry little smile on his face as he took the sketchbook. Rey’s instinct was to yank it back, but kept her hands on her sides. 

“It’s on the marked page, I—“ she began, but Luke seemed to ignore her as he stumbled upon her first sketches of Ben—him in the grocery, his food, his laundry. Seeing those sketches sent a pang straight to her chest. Her early drawings of him still seemed a little vague, like she wasn’t comfortable with drawing him yet. 

But as Luke flipped pages and Rey’s drawings became more precise, loosened up and showed more of Ben—mid laugh after she told him a joke, Ben focused on his work and biting his bottom lip. Rey’s heart gave a little flip in her chest. 

They stopped at her final drawing, and it was like her heart was bared open on the page. Ben’s head was tilted back slightly as he gazed at the viewer. He was exposed and naked, but there was nothing vulnerable about him, except for the hand placed carefully between his legs. His mouth was slightly parted, like he’d just been kissed. He’d been smiling when she did that. He hadn’t been able to stop himself. 

Neither could she, as Rey recalled.

“I’ve never seen my nephew so happy,” Luke commented. “And you made him calm.” 

“Does does it not represent him?” Holdo asked, concerned. 

“Yes,” Luke nodded. “This is him exactly. This is wonderful work. You know him well.” 

“Thank you, sir,” she said. “I…I do.”

***

That evening, Rey wanted to celebrate. She was done. She had passed her figure drawing class, and she could breathe a little bit easier knowing she was going to stay a little longer at the university. So she declared tonight a movie night, and decided she was going to make salted caramel popcorn. The world could be burning outside, but Rey could make caramel popcorn. 

Except tonight apparently. She was aware that caramel was a difficult, finicky thing to make—it required precise temperatures and sugar stages, but really, half the battle was in waiting. And Rey was good at waiting. But not today. Today her caramel crystallized. Then burned. And Rey never burned caramel, especially when she was going to put it in caramel popcorn with a little bit of sea salt. 

“OW!” she screamed, as a bit of the hot caramel scalded her hand. And, almost like it was the final straw, Rey felt tears spring in her eyes, and she just started crying. No, not crying. Sobbing. Sobbing big, fat, ugly tears of frustration and pain and anger, and damn it all of longing. She longed for Ben’s strong arms to wrap around her body and hold her close, she longed to hear him whisper into her ear that she was fine, that things were going to be fine. 

“Rey!” Finn immediately jumped up from the couch and went over to the kitchen sink, where Rey had shoved her hand under the cold water to soothe the burn. “Babe, grab the first aid kit!” 

“Got it!” Poe said, springing into action and disappearing into the bathroom. Rose, no nonsense as ever, marched over and shut off the stovetop before they burned the whole apartment down. 

“Let me see,” Finn said gently as Rose filled a bowl with cool water and instructed Rey to put her hand in. “Peanut, that looks bad.” 

“She’ll be fine, just get bandages and petroleum jelly,” Rose said, standing with Rey as Finn and Poe nearly collided in the hallway. 

“Bandages,” Poe said, taking out the equipment with speedy efficiency. He looked up at Rey. “You okay?” 

“No,” Rey said, and just admitting it made her slump forward in relief. “Ben hates me, and I fucked everything up.”

“We could have told you that,” Rose said, taking Rey’s hand from the bowl and examining the burn. It was going to scar, but nothing to be done for it now. Cooking wasn’t exactly the safest hobby. She accepted the jar of jelly from Finn and applied a generous amount to the affected area. 

“Is that why he isn’t here tonight?” Finn asked, as Poe walked off in the direction of the living room, picking up his cellphone and texting. The man was paying attention, he was just used to Finn and Rose being Rey’s first support team. 

“It was really bad Finn, he just gave me this…this look. Like he wasn’t angry anymore. And if he isn’t angry, then there’s nothing between us. Not even that.”

“Well, it’s natural for him to hurt, you pushed him away,” Rose remarked, crossing her arms over her chest once Rey’s hand was properly bandaged. “What do you want from him, Rey?”

Finn hissed something to Rose along the lines of her being mean, but Rose held her ground, and Rey considered it. What did she want from Ben Solo? 

She wanted to see him. Wanted to go grocery shopping with him, and eat pancakes and have breakfast with him. She wanted to fight and argue with him, laugh with him, and talk to him about the dark parts of her life, and hear about his. She wanted to hold him in the mornings and make love to him in the night. 

“I don’t know Rey,” Poe said suddenly, his gaze fixed on her open sketchbook on the table. He was looking at one of her favorite sketches of Ben, sitting across from her on the couch, his nose buried in his work. Not because he had to do it, but because he loved it. She liked seeing that glow of purpose to him. “I think you love him.” 

Her heart flipped in her chest, so strong and almost painful that she winced. Was that what it was? So simple a word, but it terrified her to her core. She didn’t know if she could take this. Didn’t know if Ben would spend the rest of their lives punishing her for this. 

“Do you?” Finn asked, his voice a little small, almost like he understood her hesitation completely. And he did, in a way. They were both foster kids in a former life, although he never had any expectation that his family was coming back for him, the way Rey had. 

“I…I do,” Rey said, and the confession felt natural, and real. The truth was always easy to say. “But…”  


“No buts, Rey,” Rose shook her head. “You love him. The guy’s loved you since the day he met you. He left you hanging the first time you met because he was flustered. You let him walk away because you were scared. What’s the problem?”  


“It’s okay to be scared, peanut,” Finn interjected. “But…you can’t be scared forever. Living your life miserable and alone when you have a chance with Ben? That’s not fair to you. It’s worth it. Trust me.”

He looked over at Poe, the man where his days started and ended, the man who drove Finn crazy with the way he left his clothes strewn all over the room, who spoke Spanish when he was extremely agitated with Finn’s indecisive nature. The person he loved most in the world. 

Poe grinned, and it was pretty obvious that the feeling was mutual. 

“He’s up in DC with his mom,” Poe said, holding up his phone where he had been texting since the conversation started. “Leia said she’ll keep the door open for us.”

“You’re texting Ben’s Mom?” Rose asked incredulously, as Finn and Rey sprang into action, heading to the bedroom to change, to wipe the tears and snot from Rey’s face. 

“Oh yeah. I’m text buddies with Paige too.”

“When did you even _meet _Paige?” Rose asked as Poe ducked back into the bedroom, whether it was to dodge Rose’s questions or to change, she didn’t know. Rose giggled and wandered over to Rey’s sketchbook, looking at the perfectly captured sketch of Ben Solo at work. She smiled. Two idiots in love. This was going to be interesting. 

***

Leia placed a plate of food in front of Ben. Grilled cheese with caramelized onions and warm tomato soup. His mother very, very rarely cooked, but when she did, it was the one thing Han knew how to make too—Ben’s favorite meal.

He stared down at it, and thought he was going to cry.

Leia sat down in front of him, in the seat she occupied regardless of who was or wasn’t at home. 

“We can talk about this if you want to. Or not. There’s not proper response,” she said, which was the same thing she’d said at Han’s funeral. Ben’s heart twisted in his chest. He was so tired, so goddamn tired of having to hold it all in for himself, to stay strong even when his facade was so cracked and splintered. 

So the entire story spilled out of him. The bar, the nudity. Not the sex, of course, never the sex, but everything else. How she made him feel. How comfortable he was around her. And to his utter shock, Leia didn’t interrupt. Didn’t interject. Oh, she wanted to, he could tell. His mother rarely heard anything she couldn’t comment on, but she was trying _so hard._

He actually smiled. 

“You can say something, you know,” he told her.

“What? I don’t have anything to say,” she sniffed.

“Mom,” Ben said, using a tone Han used around her before except he would say something like S_ure, Princess. You hear that Ben? She has nothing to say. Are pigs flying? _

“Ben,” she said with the same level of sternness. “What are you doing here? When a man behaves like a neanderthal, he usually runs _to _the girl, not away from her.”  


“She doesn’t want me, Mom, and I can’t force her.”

Leia actually rolled her eyes. It was so encouraging. “Then do it the conventional way. Give her flowers.” 

“Did Han ever give you flowers?” 

“Of course,” she scoffed like it was an absolute given. “He fucked up a _lot. _But we always talked things through, because that’s what adults to, Benjamin.”  


“Yeah Benjamin, that’s what adults do,” Poe’s voice teased, and Ben nearly jumped at the sight of his three friends. Finn looked less inclined to be there, and Rose was looking at him like she was trying to divine the secrets of the universe from his face, but they were here. “What? You thought you could just skip town and not have your friends check on you? Hi Leia. Oh, is that grilled cheese? Don’t mind if I do….”

Then the swarm descended, exclaiming about the house, introducing themselves to Leia, who gave her son a wry smile. Almost like she knew that while he was glad to have his friends here, they weren’t who he wanted to see right now. 

“She’s in the garage,” Finn placed a firm hand on his shoulder. “Don’t screw up.”

“I can’t make any promises,” Ben said, standing up. He pointed a finger at Poe. “Don’t eat my sandwich.”

Then he took a napkin, grabbed a sandwich, and stomped out of the house. He didn’t know if it was imagining it, but he thought he heard laughter following him in his wake. 

She was standing by the Falcon, touching the car’s ancient…well, everything. But she was staring at it with wonder and reverence. He remembered mentioning it to her once, how he and his father drove to every fast food place from here to Maryland in that thing. 

It felt like a good luck charm. _Don’t screw it up, kid. _

She looked up. God, she was gorgeous in any light. Her eyes looked a little swollen and red rimmed, and he hated that he was the reason for it. She smiled at him, nervous, tight lipped, her arms wrapped around herself. Still protecting her heart, not knowing that Ben wanted nothing more in the world than to care for it. 

“Sandwich?” he asked, holding up the grilled cheese. Rey nodded and took it, taking a bite. She frowned. “It’s different.”  


“Leia adds a little tomato paste to hers,” Ben shrugged. “Useless because we serve it with tomato soup anyway…”  


“Oh,” she said, eating the sandwich anyway. He thought he took food seriously, but Rey took it to an art form. “Imsorry.”  


“For what? Rejecting me or telling me I was stupid to think we were together?” 

She flinched. “Yes.”  


“You told me you didn’t want to be serious,” Ben pointed out. 

“I did.” She finished the sandwich.  


“So why are you here?” 

“Because I love you. And I want to be serious.” 

They stared at each other for a moment. Two moments. Three. But then again, what was three moments when they had the rest of their lives together waiting tantalizingly for them? 

Ben took a step forward, hesitant. He was afraid Rey would recoil. She didn’t. He reached out a hand for hers. She touched his, and it was like the entire universe fell into place again. Sunlight was back in Ben’s life, and he didn’t want to let it go anytime soon. 

He held her in his arms, unable to believe that this was real. That they were together. That she loved him, and he was loved. 

He opened the door to the Falcon. It was always open, what with his mother’s security walking around the place. She fell into the car, and he managed to loom over her, kissing her senseless, kissing her like there wasn’t enough time suddenly, because when someone said that they loved you, you celebrated it. Because he wanted her so much he could barely keep himself in check.

“I love you Rey,” he said, “I love you. I fucking love you.”

Rey placed her hands on his cheeks and smiled at him, stilling the heat bubbling up inside him. She kissed him softly, gently. He pressed a hand against hers, feeling the soft bandage. 

“What happened here?” he asked, kissing her palm. 

“Caramel burn,” she said. 

“Caramel,” he chuckled at the way she said it, and kissed her palm again. “I don’t know how to make that.”

“I’ll teach you sometime,” she smiled, and Ben could set his days and end his nights to that smile. 

Ben and Rey had taken two steps into the house when the four interlopers looked at them all expectantly. Ben shot them all with a glare, but Rey was only too happy to smile and hold up their clasped hands. 

They all cheered. Rose demanded Poe and Finn to pay up, and Leia was absolutely beaming before she walked over and wrapped her arms around the both of them. Everyone in the room was just as surprised.

***

_The great thing about having a boyfriend,_ Rey thought two months later. _Was that you could steal his shirts as you sign up for classes at seven in the morning. _

She sat up in Ben’s bed, wearing the shirt he’d discarded the night before, her face a mask of steely focus as Ben still remained facedown sans clothes next to her. It didn’t feel right to register for classes without clothes on, so his shirt felt like the better option. 

Anyway, class registry. Started seven am sharp, and Rey had all of her chosen classes lined up, and if Ben’s Internet didn’t crap out (which it never seemed to), she would get her dream schedule for next semester. 

“You could always do manual registration, force your way into the classes you want,” Ben grumbled from where his face was still against the pillow, one bleary eye open. 

“That’s not exactly fair, is it?” Rey asked him, wriggling her toes where she’d slipped them underneath Ben’s massive torso. He playfully bit her leg in retaliation. Rey laughed, and told him to stop, she needed to focus. 

Love was a good look for both of them, she had to admit. The road was not without its setbacks—Ben was always terrified she would bolt, and she was always worried that she would push him to the point that he would walk away from her forever, but they constantly surprised each other with how much love actually grew. How it molded and shaped itself around the both of them, and made them both feel happy and safe and content. 

“What classes are you registering for?” Ben asked, moving so his head was on her lap, squinting at her computer screen because he was a grandfather who needed glasses when he used any kind of technology (he was adorably insecure about it. Rey was into it). “Sculpting?”   


“Poe said someone had to attempt to immortalize his form,” Rey giggled. “And Maz Kanata is teaching the class, and she’s the best.”

Ben snorted and peered closer at the screen. “Rey. You didn’t.” 

“Didn’t what?” She asked innocently.

“Skywalker’s Aesthetics class. The class I’m going to be a TA for. You’re not.”

“It’s a requirement…sir,” Rey said, mischief dancing in her eyes. “Are you going to send me to detention?”

“Jesus you’re dirty,” Ben laughed as he lay on his back, looking up at her. “But I love you. For some reason.”

“I believe your exact words were I ‘fucking’ love you,” Rey said, running her hands through his hair. “But same.” 

He closed her laptop and put it aside on the bedside table. Rey would end up completely missing her registration window and have to go to manual registration anyway, but she never begrudged Ben for it.

**Author's Note:**

> I know nothing of any other school system except my own. So if something is unfamiliar...then that's my bad. But otherwise, it's pretty straightforward? Rey, Finn and Rose are in their third year undergrad and Ben and Poe are taking their Masters.


End file.
